Seduced by Moonlight--chapter 4

Just a reminder, my lovely book-readers, that Starbleached: Legacy is live, and that if you go to Smashwords you can get the first Starbleached free and the rest of the series for half price (Coupons here) until June 11th.

Also: Apparently Nook Press has decided it doesn't want to work at all. I may look at my books but I may not load in new ones. So if you want an e-pub copy either go to Smashwords or wait a week, it'll be up at Barnes and Noble by then (via Smashwords. Where it's half off until June.)

Also a heads up to my blog-readers who are also writers and/or interested in Self Publishing: Publish America, a truly toxic outfit for writers, has just rebranded itself. It's still the same shitty outfit. It still does shit like call itself a traditional, advance offering publisher--which offers a dollar advance on a seven year, self renewing contract--frequently "loses" the letters from authors notifying them that they've got no desire to renew the contract, saying that they'll show your book to everybody from the BEA expo to Hollywood Producers to J.K. Rowling (Actually that entire episode was amusing as fuck. Note to would be shitheads: DO NOT FUCK WITH MS. ROWLING HER LAWYERS WILL HURT YOU) and publishes books with no editing and/or minimal editing (Literally clicking "change all" on MSWord spellcheck, clip art covers with frequently recycled art, and a rotating tredmill of hard-sell e-mails begging authors to buy their own books at horrifically inflated prices. The Absolute Write crew sum it up as Published Author: The Role Playing Game.

They are now America Star Books

Inform your friends.

And yes. YES. I am stalling. Merry is going to make out with Kitto, and I don't want to read this, my dear blog readers.

Merry and Kitto start pawing each other. Fortunately, LKH is going out of her way not to point out that this creature is the size and shape of a small child. Unfortunately, she went out of her way to do just that in the last two books, so the image is still there. Kitto gets into it until Creeda starts shouting "Make him glow!" eagerly. I'm now imagining this chick as the little giggling muppet from Return of the Jedi. You know, the one that sat on Jabba's lap? Kitto, meanwhile, forgets all about this "having sex" thing and huddles into Merry for comfort.

Merry accuses Creeda of raping Kitto. Two sentences later, she makes the most nonsensical statement I ever read in an LKH book, and that's saying a lot.

• "Goblins will rape an enemy, or a prisoner, but they do not rape each other." (Merry) said.

It must be so nice to be clueless in LKH's world. Seriously, you expect a culture that allows for unregulated gang rape to balk at doing it to each other? And instead of addressing that maybe, kind of, sort of, everything about this is fucked up, Kurag starts needling Rhys about his own rape.

Rhys then tops the previous quote of unregulated stupidity by apologizing to his rapist for not doing enough to defend himself.

• "I know I was a fool, Kurag. The princess has told me I could have spared myself a great deal of pain, if I had known what to ask for."

It's very sad that I've hit "I can't even" stage on the fourth fucking chapter of this book, but I am like...what the actual fuck. WHAT. THE ACTUAL. FUCK.

I know that LKH is trying desperately to write non-human standards of behavior, but...yeah. Well, maybe she won't manage to top that any time--

• Kurag's leer faded into a frown. "A Sidhe admitting he is a fool, it's a miracle."
• I glanced back just enough to catch Rhys's nod. "We are an arrogant race, but some of us can learn from our mistakes."

He was raped. That was his "mistake".

...See, this is why asexual alien life forms should not be allowed to write books. They don't have the proper cultural context for the rules and boundaries of actual human interaction, and their working approximations just freaking suck.

Guys, it's the only explination that makes sense.

I shouldn't have to spell this out, you know? It's basic fucking logic. Rhys was captured by the goblins as a POW, I think, and was tortured and gang raped. HE BEARS NO RESPONSABILITY FOR BEING RAPED OR TORTURED AND ANYONE WHO THINKS HE DOES IS A WASTE OF PERFECTLY GOOD RESOURCES.

But there really is no possible way for LKH to make this any worse. I mean, what on earth could she possibly--

• "Kurag, I know your laws...you do not rape your own people..."
• "There is one exception to that rule, Merry...But if one of us sells his body for safety and shelter, then he gives up his right to refuse his body to anyone. Only his protector can dictate who can touch him and who cannot."

This is one of the worst things ever written by a human.

Guys, this is supposed to be the "Good" series. And literally every other paragraph in this chapter is something utterly rage inducing. Also: HOW IS SELLING YOURSELF INTO SEXUAL SLAVERY "SAFETY AND SHELTER". IT FUCKING IS NOT YOU FUCKING MORON. FUCK.

LKH, via Merry, dismisses this as "prostitution".

Prostitution is when you trade money for a consensual sex act. Even when you are paid for sex, you have the right to set limits, like the use of condoms or how far a customer is allowed to go. And just like any other retailer, a prostitute has the right to refuse service to a customer for any reason. Her own safety, health, and the well-being of her colleagues and other clients has priority over the needs of the individual purchaser. (And for the record, raping a prostitute is rape, not theft. You're paying for a consensual sex act, not a non-consensual one.)

SEXUAL SLAVERY is when you lose the right to refuse service. Even if you receive beneficial items from the rape, like money or shelter, you are still being forced to have non-consensual acts, and you have no ability to run or leave.

Kurag then introduces Merry to the only two half-sidhe goblins not reduced to sexual slavery, Holly and Ash. Like everyone else, they're pretty. Holly makes it clear he has no desire whatsoever to sleep with Merry. Given that he's probably fought tooth and nail not to be somebody's special party favor, I do not blame him one iota. But Kurag takes offence to this and beats him bloody in front of Merry.

Ash, meanwhile, really wants to get some magic out of Merry's Great Vag of Holding, and he starts trying to talk his brother into sleeping with Merry. His brother starts almost weeping because, you know, he doesn't want to. Ash assumes it's because he thinks that Merry, or someone else in the Unseelie court, are the ones that abandoned them to the goblins, and he points out that nobody in the mirror could possibly be their mother. Thus missing the entire fact that his brother doesn't want to have sex.

 Holly announces that he does not believe in the Great Vag of Holding, so Kurag demands that Merry make Kitto glow. Merry demands that Kitto be safe from the rest of the goblins, because as soon as he goes back to Goblintown--I really can't finish that sentence. Kurag says no, because if you let one sex slave go all the rest will make a try for it. NO REALLY, YOU THINK? Merry then tries to make herself Kitto's protector. Kurag and her bodyguards refuse to let her do this because she isn't strong enough to protect Kitto from the entire Goblin race.

So, in a movement that could have been really fucking cool if I weren't already pissed off past the point of feeling any emotion whatsoever, Rhys steps in and declares himself Kitto's protector, even though he hates Goblins, and has hated Kitto, since the first book. Doyle then declares that Kitto is Sidhe, and Merry senses that this has either kicked off or advanced a prophesy that changes the fates of all, or some shit. Gee, it'd be real nice if we were focusing on fate changing prophesy instead of INSTITUTED SEXUAL SLAVERY.

And then Kurag lets Merry know that not all the half-sidhe they've got are male, which means one of her bodyguards, like Rhys, will have to be a participant in whatever orgy they're planning.

And then he brings Rhys's primary rapist into the room.

End of chapter.

Danse Macabre--chapter 47-48

So now we're stuck in the Mother of all Darkness's head? And Anita is panicking? And this is somehow effecting the guys back at the ballet but Anita has no idea how?

I have no idea. Whatever potential plot we had is gone now, and I'm just scratching my head going whoza what now?

Oh, yeah, her. So why was I inside the head of the man she was about to eat? Why wasn’t I inside her body?

Congrats. You managed to top yourself. THAT is as phallic as it gets.

A wolf appeared between me and it. A white wolf with a dark saddle and head. Me, my wolf. This was a dream, which meant I was unconscious. Weird.

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? One second we were on the verge of Ballroom Blitz involving toe shoes, and now we're in a prehistoric cave involving cats and ghost wolves and dreams and I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.

Anita yanks herself out of the vampire dream by burning herself badly on her own cross. Everyone gathers around to watch Richard slowly peel her fingers off the cross, and apparently "peel" is the right word because bits of Anita have cooked to the cross and it's very painful.

And then they send for Dr. Lillian. They do not, mind, get Anita out of the as-yet-unseen Merlin's range. Nope. They just drag up their best were-doc because who cares about putting non-combatants in the line of fire. The reason you keep your doctors and leaders away from the front lines, kids? SO THEY CAN STILL LEAD AND FIX YOU WHEN YOU GET SHOT. Losing a couple of the guys would be sad. Losing Lillian would be very bad because there's no way to get another doctor who won't report all of them to the nearest health board and/or cop.

Anita has a phobia about needles. Oh, she needs to be sheltered from the nasty needle. Oh oh oh oh please no needles.

 Richard heads back to his date. Which he abandoned because his ex-girlfriend got hurt.

They're all terrible people. End of chapter.

Next chapter.

They drag Anita to the restaurant to do first aid on one of the fancy tables. Given that first aid involves yanking cooked in metal from Anita's hand? I am cringing for the staff when they get back. That's literally a has-mat job. First, because it's blood, and second, because it's shape shifter blood. Anita isn't a shifter, but she's established as a carrier and she ought to be contageous. So that blood spilling all over the floor, and the tablecloths, and the tables, plates, cups, silverware, candles, candle sticks and god knows what else could potentially pass therianthropy on to whoever has to clean that shit up. And possibly to a diner. I don't remember how long it can remain viable outside the body, if this were ever established, but if you can get aids from blood soaked day old needles (you can) at least one person ought to sweat the fact that a lycanthropy carrier is bleeding all over surfaces where non-infected people are going to eat.

There is no reason this could not have been done in a bathroom...other than because we want to have this done on a table with Nathanial straddling Anita's body and kissing her while they pull the cross out. SPECIFICALLY to stifle her screams.

Yes. Nate's job is to gag a screaming woman in severe pain by kissing her. This is supposed to be romantic.

They take a moment to establish that the tablecloths are being bundled up. No mention is made of bleach buckets, mops, rags, though Anita does wonder how they will explain the fresh blood. I wonder if they're going to bother informing the cleaning crew that the blood could probably infect them with wolf, lion, leopard or Who The Fuck Knows, It's Just Special, but that's just me being silly and worrying about the welfare of other human beings.

They start worrying about the MOAD. What about Merlin? The guy that Jean Claude was stressing over? The guy you powered up the kitties for? WHAT ABOUT

oh please tell me you're not seriously going to pretend that was just Anita enjoying the show. YOU WERE GEARING UP FOR BATTLE THERE. THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN LEADING UP TO YOU--

--they're leaving the theater. THEY. ARE LEAVING. THE THEATER. HOPE YOU DIDN'T WANT A DANCE PLOT BOYS AND GIRLS BECAUSE THAT WAS IT.

However, Lillian still thinks that the Dance Plot can be resuscitated and asks Anita to clear the morphene out of her system by...

oh fuck me gently with a buzzsaw she's summoning the goddamned munin.

 She smiled, and patted my cheek. “Once you are healed, your beasts may rise, so I will leave you with people who can take your beast, if they must.”
 “I don’t understand.” 
“But I think we should start with someone that Raina never touched. I knew her, you see; she always loved new conquests.” 

I shook my head, gently. “Don’t understand.”

And this is going to be different from the rest of the book HOW? Other than it being Rania the Friendly Sadist and not Anita the reluctant one? WE HAD A PLOT. IT WAS RIGHT THERE. WE WERE ALL LOOKING AT IT. WHY ARE WE NOT DOING THE DANCE PLOT?

ARE YOU ALLERGIC, LARUELL? IS THAT IT? ARE YOU JUST PLAIN ALLERGIC TO HAVING PLOTS NOW? IS THAT WHAT THE PROBLEM IS? WHAT THE FUCK, IT WAS RIGHT THERE. I WAS LOOKING AT IT. YOU HAD A PLOT AND THEN YOU DERAILED IT SO WE CAN WATCH RANIA TORTURE-FUCK SOMEBODY NEW.

I DONT EVEN I CAN'T THERE IS NO EVEN THERE IS NOTHING THERE IS ONLY FUCK.

So yeah, they kick Lillian out of the car, and she drops plot points to try to keep us entertained but Anita is too busy getting Jason to help her out of her glittery corset to bother. We get a run-down of Rania's history which basically boils down to "Murderer who died horribly who should be fucking dead and out of this goddamn book."

And the one person here Anita hasn't fed on, who would "Count" to Rania for some reason (I DON'T EVEN FUCKING KNOW) Is Noel. The cute little boy that Anita now dismisses as just a baby. Mercifully, they kick him out of the car because Requiem is wounded enough to "count" to Rania.

Finally Requiem locks eyes with Anita and they gaze into each other's souls and THANK YOU FUCKING GOD that is the end of the chapter.

Narcissus in Chains chapter 37

Richard and Anita are now going to have sex. Unless a particular part about the screwing catches my eye, I'm probably not going to say a lot about that. Sex is sex.

Instead, we're going to talk about love and terrible people, and look in at the pair to see how long this is going to take.

I think part of the reason the sex scenes in Anita Blake, Merry Gentry et all fall so flat is because we, the readers, do not give one flying fuck about the characters. Merry is still (passably) an okay character. This is less because she's better written and more because she's not human and was not raised in a human enviroment, so her psycopathic tendancies are more understandable. She's a fairy princess from the days when they would eat your children. We don't expect human behavior from her, and we're not pissed when we don't get it.

Same thing goes with weres. We don't expect completely human behavior, and we let a lot of things float that we'd call bullshit on if the character were human, as long as the non-human behavior is in character for the animals. (Remember, sports fans: Leopards eat people too).

But Anita is human, and she doesn't get the same excuses other characters do. She's not fighting a beast inside of her. She never shape shifts. She does not get the excuse of instincts, heightened aggression, or full moon blues. She's held to a normal standard of behavior.

And normal people do not leave other people out on their back porch to die just because they don't want to get the carpet dirty.

He half-walked, half-staggered to the bed, laying me on it, going to his knees beside it. He was laughing as he crawled onto the bed beside me. He lay beside me, his knees hanging over the side of the bed,

There are about four words in that paragraph that no longer look like words to me.

Anyway, Anita's basic failure as a human being makes her unlikable, and that gives readers a problem. Readers don't like to see bad people rewarded. Anita gets rewarded all the fucking time with powers and sex and more sex and more powers, and more powers that come from sex, and pretty hot guys who, apparently, never heard about scissors. And that makes us angry because Anita does nothing in the books to deserve hot guys and sex and magic.

You know District 9? One of my all-time favorite movies? The story only worked because Wikus was a racist piece of shit at the beginning, and he stopped being one in the end. Because an awful, awful lot of bad things happen to him, and he earned every single one of them in the first thirty minutes of the movie. If he'd been a nice guy with no objectionable character traits, we probably would have hated the movie completely.

“I want to run my beast through you, Anita.”

Oh, so THAT'S what they're calling it now. I thought we settled on Mr. Winky.

Richard is also horrible. He's horrible not because he fails at basic human morality, but because he fails at leadership. He is doing a terrible job with the wolves, he has no control over his emotions, he allows himself to be set up as his author's strawman for her arguements against conventional morality, and he lets Anita screw with him. He's a ball of aggression and teeth without a backbone to support it.

And now we're supposed to be aroused by watching them have sex.

And now their beasts are touching.

That's probably my biggest issue with LKH's sex scenes, beyond watching two horrible fake human beings get it on: The metaphysical shit. I can relate to most of the mechanics of normal sex, but how the fuck am I supposed to relate to this:

My beast rose as if from a great, warm, wet depth, up, up to meet the warm, burning rush of Richard’s energy. He pushed his beast through me, and I could feel it, impossibly huge, the brush of fur so deep inside me that I cried out. I felt his beast as if it had crawled inside me and was caressing things from the inside that his hands would never have touched. My power seemed less certain than his, less solid. But it rose around the hard, muscled fur like velvet mist, swirling through his power, through my own body.

I don't have visions of deep forests and dark places here. I think that Richard's beast is pawing Anita's kidneys and lower intestine. That is not romantic.

Ugh, and more talk about how big Anita's men are and how they have to be careful of her. I'm suddenly reminded of Mae West. "Forget about the six feet, let's talk about the seven inches." Aren't guys, like, you know, mostly the same size?

And good fucking GOD, people, don't ever use the words "Wet Hammering" in connection to lovemaking. It'd be a good band name, but I don't think "Oh!" when I see that, folks. I think OW.

The thing about books, kids, is we want our characters to earn their happiness. We want to see them do great things and then get a shiny reward. If the reward doesn't match the actions preformed, too big or too small, we become unsatisfied with the story. If Wikus had gotten to go home at the end of District 9 we would all have been unhappy. But the fact that he keeps paying for being a racist shithead long after the movie itself is over (Given that Blomkamp has NO PLANS to do the fucking sequel yet, goddamn it, we must assume it is forever) we are sated. Not happy, maybe, but sated. With Anita getting to bang Richard after making Gregory wait god knows how long for decent medical attention, we're just as unsatisfied. All Anita has done is whine, get hurt and have sex.

I'm not minimizing the rape, here. It was a horrible thing, and she'd be fully justified taking time off to recover  from it.

But stories aren't interesting when a character licks their wounds onscreen. They are interesting when a character says "fuck it" and starts taking an active hand in their life. And Anita, for all her posturing and grandstanding and tough-girl attitude, is passive as fuck in this whole story.

...given what they're doing in the background, that MIGHT have been a poor choice of words.

Punishment/reward is a real dynamic in storytelling. It's one of those things that the consious mind doesn't see, but that the unconsious latches onto like a limpet. We want Cinderella to become the princess every time, and also for her stepsisters and stepmom to be punished.


Anita Blake stopped being Cinderella a long, LONG time ago.

YAY! The chapter's done! I'm now going to go wash my eyes out with bleach, and the rest of you are welcome to join me.

Narcissus in Chains--chapter 17

I'm going to say something that will probably be controversial and easy to take out of context, but I'm going to say it anyway. And no, it's not that Anita is a--

--whatever. Bear with me for a couple seconds, okay?

The Gor novels are better than this series.


That is not a compliment.

The Gor books are terrible. They are a waste of space. Trees died so those books could exist, and that means everyone involved in their publication should be brought up on some kind of crime against the plant kingdom. But John Norman, sick and twisted as he was, did want to make humanity better. His basic thesis was so wrong it was a literal hate crime, but his goal, in his own sick, twisted way, wasn't all that different from, say, Ayn Rand. He identified that something was "wrong" with the world and tried to fix it through his writing. He should be shot into space without oxygen, but he's a better writer in every possible category than Laurell K. Hamilton.

Yes. I just said that. See, I read ahead last night, and I have never been so throughly pissed off at a chapter in a book as I am right now. I said yesterday this book has surpassed all our abilities to feel shock and horror. I was fucking wrong.

I really hope the words "fuck you" don't irritate anybody, because you're going to be hearing them a lot. In the back of my head I expected the section to be one big, long, rolling, nasty sex scene. It is not. It takes literally FOREVER for us to get to the sex. And what happens between now and the sex is just...

In fairness, this whole book would make Applebloom puke

So lets just dive in, shall we?

When we last left our (gag) "heroes" they had all decided to feed Anita's lust demon by having JC feed on Jason and Asher feed on Nathanial and Anita feed on everybody, because apparently being bitten by vampires feels really good. I'm not criticizing that last little bit, by the way. That's legit lore. At least they're not sparkling. So now they all pile into bed, and a freaking miracle happens, boys and girls:

Somebody asks somebody else for their consent.

“Do you want Asher to feed from you?” 

“Oh, yes,” Nathaniel said,

Wow. Somebody in this book finally commits an act of human decency. I'm starting to get im--

My voice sounded as breathless as his when I said, “I’m not on birth control.”
 
Everyone froze. Jean-Claude peered over Jason’s shoulder. “What did you say, ma petite?”

 “I stopped taking the pill six months ago. I’ve only been on it for two weeks. No guarantee for another two to four weeks.”

 “You made love to the Nimir-Raj.”

 “He’s been fixed.” 

Asher said, “She did what?”

That's the rape scene he's referencing there. Now, to get it out of my system: 

There really aren't any words that aren't on macros that I can use right now. She did not make love to him, she did everything she could to get out of the situation, she didn't want it to happen in the first place, and now, boys and girls, the people she loves are shoving her face back into it at the drop of a hat. And the rape scene was still less than twenty-four hours ago.

Fuck you, Jean Claude.

So now we get an unbearably long scene in which everybody talks about how careless Anita is for not being on birth control and how awful it would be if there were surprise penis during this thing and she were to get preggers with an unwanted baby.

Because birth control is totally all about avoiding getting pregnant, and there is no other reason a woman would get on it, ever.

I can't speak for other women, but when I was on birth control I had no intention of having sex with anybody. I was on it because I read that it alleviated menstrual cramps. At the time, mine were fucking debilitating. There is pain, there is pain so big you cannot function, and then there is pain so big you pass out on the floor of a public bathroom. I've had infected teeth that haven't hurt that bad. And the pill worked.

And you know what else I "Love?" How it's totally the woman's job to take care of icky reproductive issues. What happened to keeping a rubber in your wallet, guys? 

And it's Anita who whines the whole time--and you have no idea how much I would like to not be using that word, but that's the only thing that fits--about how they said no sex and condoms just complicate things and she doesn't want her boys using condoms...and then the worst thing I have ever read commences. 

Jean Claude decides that everybody needs to wear condoms. And this is how he talks her into it.

“I think I can keep from fucking them.” I sounded angry, but it wasn’t anger that I felt, it was a seed of doubt. That hesitation made the anger worse. I always hid behind anger when I could.

 “And before this morning, you would have sworn even more strongly that you would not fuck a strange man you had just met.”

 The blush was so hot, it almost hurt. “I didn’t mean to.” That sounded weak even to me. “I couldn’t  .  .  .” 

“You could not control yourself, ma petite, I know. But if you lose control again, would you not rather be safe?”

And now they are using her rape to manipulate her. Oh god, she's so wonton. Oh, god, she loses control around people. Oh, god, we have to remind her of this to keep her horrible uncontrolable female sex drive from making our lives miserable with an unwanted pregnancy.

Let me go turn off Robot Cyborg Susan for a second. This part isn't going to be funny.

This bullshit is why I called Anita a bitch earlier. And while I'll admit that it's wrong to use a gendered word as shorthand for "terrible waste of human skin" I stand by the underlying meaning of what I said: If you do this, you are a terrible waste of human skin. You do not identify the weakest point in someone's psyche and then use it to manipulate the other person and get what you want. It's like Jean Claude decided to tickle Anita's third degree burns to get her to lie down and be a sport about things. This shit is not okay. Not now. Not tomorrow. Not three million years from now. Not ever. If you are aware that someone else has a deep emotional wound, like from being cheated on OR BEING RAPED LESS THAN A DAY AGO, you do not use that wound as leverage to get what you want out of the other person.

And even if it's not rape--it totally is, but let's play devil's advocate here--it's still fucking wrong. She's upset that she made a mistake with a stranger, she's doubting herself, she's very fucked up inside. YOU DON'T USE SOMEONE ELSE'S PAIN AGAINST THEM. EVER.

In short, Fuck you, Jean Claude. Fuck you, Micah, and FUCK YOU Laurell K. Hamilton for passing this psychological fuckery off as something morally acceptable in ANY relationship.

Okay. Turning Susan back on.

Jean Claude does it again less than two paragraphs later. So he's brought up her lack of control twice, her "sex with a stranger" twice, AND SHE WAS FUCKING RAPED WHEN IT HAPPENED.

How could no one see what was wrong with this?

Finally, though, Anita agrees with everything Jean Claude said, because she can't argue with him.

 The problem with battling a manipulator is that they are convincing. They know how to twist your words and actions against you in ways you cannot easily fight. They're wrong, they know they're wrong, YOU know they're wrong, but they know how to make it look like they're right, and with a manipulator, the appearance is the only thing that matters. The result of arguing with a manipulator is usually you either storming off, voiceless and angry, or you agreeing even though every cell in your body is screaming they're wrong, simply because you can't think your way out of what they just said.  

You cannot argue with a manipulator, kids. You can only disengage, and then distance yourself from them. And if you have to confront them, have witnesses. 

Now can we just have disgusting five-way sex and get this scene over with?

No, we can't. Because we have to make this even worse. Anita says "Well, I can go to the lupanar anyway," And Jean Claude replies with the following:

He tried not to meet my gaze. His shields were back in place, and I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. “You would be attracted to all the men. You would  .  .  . I cannot guarantee what you would do, ma petite, or who you would do it with.”

There really aren't words anymore. Not only is Jean Claude slut-shaming, he's slut-shaming a rape victim.

But CW! I hear you saying. He might not know that it's a rape! LKH intended the rape scene to be loving intercourse. She herself never considered it to be a rape scene. How do we know that unfair manipulation and slut shaming are what Jean Claude is really doing? How do we know CW isn't interpreting this the wrong way?

Because this happens two paragraphs later:

“Let me spare you such degradation, ma petite. You are not as I was. You have never given yourself freely. I fear what you would do, or think of yourself, if you did these things. I do not think your sense of yourself would survive intact.”

In other words, my dear blog-readers,

HE FUCKING KNOWS SHE WAS RAPED.
  He knows, and so does LKH. It's right there in the text. The bolded part.

Jean Claude then goes on about how he was able to learn how to feed the ardeur from a distance, but it took him five years and he had to learn control all on his lonesome, and Anita is getting more and more horrified as she realizes she's going to have to live with uncontrollable lust for lust for the rest of her life (and no, that's not a typo) and then Jean Claude does it again: 

“If you had withstood the Nimir-Raj’s advances, then I would say that your strength of will might conquer it.

She was raped, you undead piece of shit. She did resist his advances. She just didn't try to claw his eyes out.

And then Jean Claude tells her that if she doesn't feed the ardeur, she'll start literally eating her friends.

And then Anita says "fine, but everybody needs to be wearing pants. I'll go get my underwear."

And then Jean Claude says "yes, but you might order them to take it all off, because you'll lose control of your mouth, too."

The chapter ends with Anita thinking that maybe just throwing in the towel and becoming a psychopath isn't such a bad idea after all.

This chapter was the worst part of the book that I've read...so far. And I know it will probably get worse. I just don't want to think about what "worse" might mean for now. I'm going to go play a video game for an hour, and then paint until I have to go to work. Not noble, but shiny pretty video games should get the taste out of my mouth.

Captive of Gor chapter seventeen

Two chapters left. Come on, it's almost over with...

Strawchick assures us that this past weeks have been THE BEST WEEKS OF HER LIFE, right as we're reading about Rask selling her. I guess Rask just didn't like having girlfriend hanging around.

No, actually he sold her because he was getting too attached, and being attached to a woman is like, tres bad or something.

And John Norman continues to fail at everything.

In the beginning, following my total conquest by Rask of Treve, I had been summoned night after night to his tent. I had served him in a delicious variety of ways, to our mutual pleasure, for I had been well trained.

Yeah. Because if a woman doesn't enjoy the sex, it's her fault.

Inge and Rena were not in the basket with me. They had been given to the huntsmen, Raf and Pron. In the fashion of Gorean huntsmen, both girls had then been freed and given a head start of four Ahn, that they might escape, if it were in their power. After four Ahn, Raf and Pron, running lightly, carrying snare rope, left the camp. The next morning they had returned, leading Inge and Rena. The thighs of both girls had been bloodied.

I found I was now the victim, the prisoner, of “slave needs.” I now understood how girls could weep and scratch at the walls of their kennels, how they could squirm, moaning, shackled in their pens, how they could press their face and flesh against the cruel bars that confined them in their tiny cages, moistening the obdurate, grasped steel with their tears. How can a free woman even understand this?

It's called Stockholm Syndrome, and if you get the right medications and therapy, we can clear that all right up.

On Earth millions of women live empty, unrewarding lives. They are sexually deprived, denied their femininity’s right to be so powerfully desired, so lusted for, that they are taken in hand and made slaves.

This, this right here, is the part that is just fucking disgusting about these books. My life is empty and unrewarding, not because I work in a shit job, but because I don't have slave-sex in it. Hell, let's be more specific: because I haven't been raped. My life is "unrewarding" because men don't lust after my boobs and coochie enough to violate my rights as an individual and take my freedom of choice away. No. I must be "taken in hand" like I'm fucking six years old and disobediant.


This makes it sound like I'm a prisoner of my boobs and sex drive. And it's all projection. Because he wants to rape me, he assumes I want to be rape. He is unable to even concieve that somebody might not want the same things he does. This is the single most offensive thing in the whole boat, and I now want to go wash my brain out with soap.

But Strawchick does one thing right:

I had asked one thing of Rask of Treve, before, stripped, I had entered the tarn basket. “Free Ute,” I had asked him.

SHE GETS OUT OF THIS BOOK! THE ONE GOOD CHARACTER SO FAR GETS TO LEAVE THIS STINKING BOOK!

So Strawchick gets sold and works at a tavern. What kind of work does she do?

The men I served, Targo’s men, and others, who might have me for the price of a cup of paga, I gave much pleasure, and from them, too, I received much pleasure.

Did you expect anything better?

Then the creepy guy with the talking monster buys her, drags her to a warehouse, and demands that she serve him. She refuses, bravely, and then there is a great reveal!

The man lifted his head, and shook it, clearing his vision. “El-in-or?” he said. “Master!” I wept. I pressed myself to him. He regarded them. Then he said to me, “I am of Treve. Do not stain my honor.” By the hair I was dragged from the presence of Rask of Treve, and his head, again, fell forward on his chest.

Oh, noes! What will they have Strawchick do?

Well, do you remember pages back when they revealed the dastardly purpose for which she'd been brought from Earth? No? Well, they want her to assassinate Tarl Cabot! AKA Bosk of Port Kar!

...you have no idea who that is? You are so lucky.

So she gets to the point where she is about to give Tarl the poison, and then decides that she'd be better off telling the truth she wouldn't dare smear Rask's precious honor. She tells Tarl that she was ordered to poison him at the last possible second, and they go haring off to punish the evil doers and rescue Rask, only to discover he escaped! OH NOES!

Oh, and Rask only came to Port Kar to find her! But sadly, Tarl will only sell her for twenty gold pieces and Rask never buys his women. Strawchick and her One True Wub Master will be parted forever! Even though she now has reason to believe he loves her too!

And then...ugh.

but I was content in the knowledge that he, whom I loved, lived.

That, right there? Is my personal definition of unconditional love. Love is something you feel outside of yourself. You'd rather see your loved one happy than own them. Think the Rose and the Nightengale. 

Norman needs to get his nasty paws off genuine feeling.

Now the sad, sad narrative is winding down and Strawchick is whining and whinging about how much she misses Rask

And then, the last chapter! WE'RE GOING TO FINISH THIS BOOK TODAY! YAY!

Tarl/Bosk is now our narrator. NO MORE WOMAN FAIL GUYS! And Strawchick has told him that Talena is alive and in Verna's hands! WHY SHOULD WE CARE? And he watches her wander his halls mooning over her lost love-love-love, and then...

Ladies and gentlemen, it is my sad duty to inform you that, beneath my bitch-craft exterior, I am a sopping romantic. My favorite movies include Pride and Prejudice, Kate and Leopold, and there is even a place in my cold, withered heart for Breaking Dawn. I've also been watching My Little Pony and enjoying it. I mention this because I want you to understand. It takes a lot of cutsie to make me upchuck. And the ending of this book? Man the vomit buckets. It's gonna get bad.

The tarn strike was sudden. I had been waiting for days for it to happen.

Gee, I wonder what woman raping warrior of Treve this could be?

The tarn’s talons struck the delta wall, and, wings beating, it clung there, and put back its head and screamed. I saw, for one moment, the helmet of the warrior, and his hand extended downward. I heard the girl cry out and run to the saddle, and seize the hand. “No!” I said to Thurnock, putting my hand on the arrow, thrusting it to one side. He looked at me wildly. “No!” I said, sternly.

Because Tarl Cabbot can never stand between a chick stealing rapist True Love

Thurnock fetched it, and brought it to me. It was heavy, and leather. It was a purse, and it was filled with gold. In the light of a torch I counted the coins. There were a hundred of them, and they were of gold. Each bore the sign of the city of Treve.

See? Get it? Get it? Rask, who never paid for a woman before, has paid for this one. He really, truely loves Strawchick! HE LOVES HER! HE LOVES HER!

How do I feel about this ending?

But the good news is...it's DONE. I do not have to read this awful awful book anymore. NO MORE GOR! NO MORE GOR! YAY!

...but now I have to pick a new, terrible book, don't I? What was the list for the last one?

2. City of Bones, by Cassandra Clare
3. Eternal Prey, Nina Bangs (Yes, indeed it is a blissful vacation of stupid)
4. Mission Earth: Black Genesis.

Yeah, there we go.

I'll be accepting imput all week, and we'll start up the next book on Sunday!

Captive of Gor 16

I am reviewing this because editing is giving me a headache. That is the only reason. This book sucks this bad. I do not remembering it being that goddamn awful.

Okay. It'll be okay. I can have booze when I'm done. Everything is good. And Strawchick and Rask have just had sex. Things will get better from here.

“Let her be chained under the moons of Gor,” had said Verna. Rask of Treve had laughed.

Or...not.

First of all...why could Strawchick's new humiliation not be onscreen? And if this conversation couldn't be on screen, why couldn't we just skip it? Do you know what the title of this chapter is? I am chained beneath the Moons of Gor. It's not like we expected Strawchick to be having a tea party back on Park Avenue.

...oh, we're going to find out about all this. As a flashback. Whoop-de-fucking-do. I'm so excited. (/sarcasm)

So Strawchick is happy after her adventures in Rask's sleeping furs. She even apologizes to Ute! Isn't she a wonderful person!

No. No she isn't.

As I could, during the day, I had made it my business to pass near the tent of Rask of Treve, that he might see me. But he had scarcely seemed to notice me. 

Last night it had been different! 

He had noticed me then!

About a month ago I confessed that I had been assaulted under conditions that could have been consensual. The thing that haunts me about what happened? It's not what happened to me, or what I did before, during, or after the assault. it was the fact that I didn't matter. The things that happened were awful, but it was realizing and understanding that I was kleenex to this guy, that he cared so very little about me as a human being that destroyed me.

My point? Strawchick is a deluded idiot, and so is John Norman for the massive OOC character shift he's about to put Rask through. Men who use women for sex, in that fuck'em and leave 'em sense? DO NOT CARE ABOUT WOMEN. The words "NO FUCKING SHIT" cannot be written big enough on this passage.

Verna calls Strawchick on her shit, then demands she be chained out under the moons of Gor, naked, of course, and...uh, we get to listen to Strawchick moan about how great sex is, and how once a woman experiances it she basically becomes an animal.

Thank you, Norman. Fuck you too.

I wanted to seek the feet of Rask of Treve, on my belly, abjectly, as befits a slave; I wanted to cover them with soft, abundant cascades of hair, water them with salty, plentiful tears; I wanted to lick them, deferentially, lengthily, with a small, warm tongue; I wanted to kiss them, timidly, tenderly, again and again, over and over, pressing moist, hot, pleading, hopeful lips to them, not even daring to raise my eyes to his.

 After this GOES. FUCKING. ON, Verna comes out and humiliates Strawchick more, then leaves the camp with Talena. YAY, this will be the next Gor novel. Which I am not reading, and you can't make me. Also? Verna wants to "submit" to Marleanus.

Ten bucks says that happens in the next book.

The slave then, so alerted, instantly stood ready, cognizant, apprehensive, frightened, on her tether.

This is a PERFECT description of an abuse victim, and how they begin to behave towards their abuser. THIS IS NOT HOW A WOMAN BEHAVES TOWARDS A LOVER.

 Indeed, it is not unusual for a master and his slave to love one another with a richness and depth perhaps unknown, perhaps impossible, amongst free couples.

FUCK you, Norman, and FUCK the people who highlighted that passage as something worth repeating.

Sometimes, however, she may beg to be tied and whipped, for this reassures her that she is still of interest to, and important to, the master. Better the whip and his anger than his coldness or indifference. “Have I not been pleasing to my master? I fear I may have been insufficiently pleasing. I beg, therefore, that he will see fit to instruct me, to admonish me, to reprove me, that my many faults, those of an unworthy slave, may to some extent be rectified, that I may be more pleasing to him.

Let me point out that this, and the other passages quoted? Are nominally things that Strawchick is thinking while she is chained to the ground. WOW.

The one good thing about this? It gave me a beautiful idea for revisions in the first half of Prince of the Gray Keep. I probably shouldn't do it, but I am just that pissed off with the concepts of this story.

How does her chaining end?

With Rask having sex with her, still chained. Because this is romantic. I'm going to puke.

And we are now moving into the part of the book that is so cutesy wootsy fluffy it would make the characters from MLP:FIM vomit in your lap.

“What are you now?” he asked. “Only your slave,” I whispered, looking up at him, “only your humbled, helpless slave, Master.” He laughed. I smiled. “I have heard,” he said, “that there is an insolent female slave in camp, a proud, unconquered girl.” I shook my head. “No longer, Master,” I said. “Did she escape?” he asked. “No, Master,” I smiled, “she did not escape.”

This goes on, my loyal blog-readers. It goes on. And on. and on. And then he sends her away, and Ute gives her a roll, and she goes off to work, and the chapter ends.

Not very entertaining, I know.  But I've had enough of being annoyed by Strawchick tonight. You wanna know what's less annoying than Strawchick?

This is.



Let's hope that gets the bad taste out of your mouth.

Captive of Gor chapter 15

Oh, hey, Ute's back!

The guard, by the hair, threw me to her feet. I looked up at her with horror. The left side of her forehead was still discolored where I had struck her with a rock.

Yes. Strawchick aka Elinor Brinton, our protagonist, is at the mercy of the slave girl she betrayed to slavers, beat over the head with a rock and then left for dead rapening. This will not end well for her. For the rest of us, we will get our vicarious pleasure from this. And it is all the pleasure we will ever get, because I re-read the ending and, uh...

By the way, the google image search for "unicorn puke" is surprisingly unsatisfactory.

It's that bad.

Anyway, the Ute and Strawchick reunion (/kickass Paul Simon reference)

It becomes apparent via bullshit clothing references that Ute is second-in-command, or thereabouts, in Rask's camp. And Strawchick cost Ute her freedom by bashing her in the head with a rock. Ute proves she is the better human being by not immediately doing that to Strawchick. She does, however, immediately figure out Strawchick's plan to get Ute's parents to adopt Strawchick out of gratitude, proving that Strawchick is still dumber than a bag of gravel.

We then copy and paste the conversation Strawchick's had with just about everybody else since the start of this book...

By the hair, Ute, bending over me, yanked my head painfully up. 

“Who betrayed Ute?” she demanded. 

I shook my head. 

Ute’s fists were excruciating in my hair. “Who?” she demanded. 

I could not speak, so terrified I was. 

Please, Strawchick, for the love of God. Listen to Yoda. Don't imitate him.

She shook my head viciously. “Who!” she demanded. 

“I did,” I cried. “I did!”

“Speak as a slave!” demanded Ute.

 “El-in-or betrayed Ute!” I cried. “El-in-or betrayed Ute!”

 “Worthless slave,” I heard a voice behind me say.

Yes, Rask, Strawchick's owner and future penis, has heard what she did. Oh, dear, how humiliating! How terrible! How do I feel about this turn of events, given that Strawchick is suffering greatly?

Sadly for me, Ute is a good person. She treats Strawchick like she's just another slave, and not a terrible hell beast that destroys all she touches. Meanwhile Strawchick spends all her time whimpering in fear, so there is that. After a while, Strawchick becomes irritated with Ute.

Because Ute isn't treating Strawchick as a favorite.

Then Strawchick says that she's shirking her tasks as often as possible, because, you know, she's a lazy stupid stuffed shirt intended to prove all John Norman's arguements about women are valid, and...uh, then John Norman fucks up. Ute catches Strawchick not washing the dishes properly, and decides she needs an object lesson. She has Strawchick take the pan outside where there is a pole with chains on it, and this happens:

“The girl’s wrists,” said Ute, “are tied together, and then she is tied, suspended by the wrists, from the high pole. Her ankles are tied together and tied, some six inches from the ground, to the iron ring. That way she does not much swing.” 

I looked at her, holding the pan.

 “This is a whipping pole,” said Ute. “You may go now, El-in-or.”

Ute. Is. Bad. Ass. Awesome. OH. MY. GOD, why is this woman not the main character? She's betrayed by a bosom companion, she treats her fellow slaves with DIGNITY and RESPECT, she gets respect from ALL the things Men in this story, and she says things like that. This is not a threat to whip Strawchick. Oh, no. This is an acknowledgement that Strawchick isn't even fucking worth threatening. If this girl were the main character, in another ten pages she would have organized the slaves, male and female, into an absolute rebellion, the whole planet would have been thrown into revolt, a Final Stand would be made, and then Ute would retire with her Fully Equal boyfriend as a librarian in some backwater country, because fuck that leadership shit.

...actually, that's probably why she isn't the main character.

Moving on.

Life in the camp is described, and also Strawchick's misery at not being acknowledged as potential rape meat a dancing slave. She is SOOOOO conflicted. And Inge and Rana are dragged into the camp too! Because if we had fewer characters, THE PLOT MIGHT ACTUALLY GO SOMEWHERE!

Inge and Rana are sent to the same shed as Strawchick, and Ute first imposes her authority over the newcomers, and then demands that they not abuse Strawchick. Or else they will be beaten. She defends her betrayer. WHY IS THIS GIRL SUPPORT CAST?

Right. John Norman book.

Then Free And Noble Verna gets in on the action, too. Seriously, there are so many potentially awesome characters piling in at the last minute, I really don't get this. It's going to go nowhere, of course, but just...DAMN IT, I COULD BE READING A GOOD BOOK RIGHT NOW!

Of course, Verna was only freed to humiliate her captor, because Men Are All That Matter. Then they go through a party, where Strawchick shows the quality of her training, and is further humiliated by Verna and her master...who begins to remember that She Has Boobs...and Stuff from the first books are revealed. Without going into a lot of detail, John Norman's self insert primary main character, Tarl Cabot, has a girlfriend, and Rask captured that girlfriend and has her as a slave. This probably pays off later in the series, but I have no intention of reading Conan: The Knockoff any more than I already have.

Then Strawchick is finally allowed to serve in the main feasts, though she is told very strongly not to let herself be raped, as that would diminish her value as a slave.

I hate these books. Have I mentioned that yet? That I hate these books?

Anyway, she moans about being given the privelage she moaned about being denied, and then goes and picks berries with another girl. Only she steals most of them, is caught, lies about it, and then gets branded by her master. And one paragraph is really satisfying:

“It marks you as a traitress,” said Rask of Treve. He looked at me, with fury. “Be marked as a traitress,” he said. Then he pressed the third iron into my flesh. As it entered my flesh, biting and searing, I saw Ute watching, her face betraying no emotion. I screamed, and wept, and screamed.

Ute should be the main character, guys. Ute should win all the things.

Then Strawchick gets beaten. First, one lash for every letter in each word she's been branded for (Liar, theif, traitoress) and then however much Rask wants to beat her, and then...WOW, Norman. Just fucking WOW.

Ten more strokes he gave to the helpless slave girl, who twice more lost consciousness, and twice more was awakened to the drenching of cold water. And then, as she scarcely understood, hanging half conscious in the fires of her pain, she heard him say, “Cut her down.”

How the FUCK did you miss dropping out of First Person like that? There's a lot of excuses--bad editor, typing one handed--but...DAMN. That is some prime-grade writer fail right there. Look, I get that it's hard to maintain tense (Taker was an unholy bitch to edit, given there were whole paragraphs where I dropped out of present tense, and yeah yeah yeah I know, I probably left a lot of mistakes in there) and maybe perspective is just as hard (I dunno. For me, keeping the voice going is kinda, uh, natural) but DUDE, that's writing 101!

And if it's a style choice...it doesn't work. Mostly because the perspective change goes on for another paragraph. And it IS possible to do a torture scene without dropping perspective like an idol singer falling off key. See Endurance by S. L. Vehil for a good example. (...ya know, Cherijo sure gets the shit kicked out of her. It gets kind of satisfying after a while. Jarn, I liked. Cherijo is in the same category as Sookie Stackhouse. Book=good, character=SHOOT ON SIGHT)

...I have to keep reading this, don't I? Fuck.

So Strawchick gets locked in a box for her own stupidity, and...

The girl in the slave box was under no delusion as to who it was who owned her.

We drop out of first person AGAIN for another whole paragraph. Look, I will be the last person to accuse a professional writer of what "typing one-handed" implies, but...uh, this is happening an awful lot.

Also? After a couple of days, all they feed Strawchick are bugs and water. Then Strawchick is released, and...

Elinor Brinton heard the padlocks unlocked. She heard the flat, heavy bolts slide back. She saw the small door swing open. On her hands and knees, painfully, inch by inch, she crawled from the box. She then collapsed to the grass.

Look, are we having seizures or something? Are you just not reading this shit anymore? HOW DO YOU DROP PERSPECTIVE THIS MAY TIMES? I'm not going to bring this up again, but this is happening literally every other page. It's happened before in the book, but it came off as Strawchick feeling miserable for herself. It's not working anymore. It's reading like every other paragraph, Norman forgot who was talking. Oh, She's still feeling miserable for herself. Woe is me, I've been branded, and so forth, but the tense changes are far, far more interesting than her moping.

Oh, hey, we haven't brought up worldbuilding fail in a while.

It could perhaps be mentioned that such work, cooking, cleaning and laundering, and such, is commonly regarded as being beneath even free women, particularly those of high caste.

...then why do you have free women in this culture? And I'm dead serious. WHY. ARE THERE FREE WOMEN IF NONE OF THEM DO ANY WORK?

Equality of the sexes is not about avoiding work. It's the fucking opposite. It's about getting valuable work. In our modern culture, "women's" work has been devalued by technological advances. Spinning, weaving, basic cooking/baking/canning/preserving and clothing manufacture are done outside of the home due to advances in the textile and manufacturing industries, therefor women have less to do in the home and bring in a smaller income.

Okay, I'm about to go off on a tangent that will, again, break Norman's whole universe. My hobby? Is spinning yarn and knitting lace. I know a little about the history, a little about the traditions, and a LOT about the actual manufacture. And the one thing that is bleeding fucking obvious? Weaving and spinning are women's work. Because large scale thread production? Takes a while. A. LONG. WHILE.

And while we're at it, let's take a second to really look at all those clothing descriptions Norman gives us. First off, they obviously have some large scale looms to justify giving even rough-spun fabrics to slaves as garments. And they can waste a lot of fabric, because the slaves are given peroidic changes of clothes. There is, at minimum, a weaver's caste that is NEVER FUCKING BROUGHT UP, but that does a shit load of work. Second, the dancing silks.

Oh, my God, the dancing silks.

Silk is not an easy fiber to work with. Silk fiber comes from moth cocoons. Fine silk thread is made by taking a whole bunch of cocoons and boiling them, then finding where the moth started making its fiber and unwinding the whole cocoon in one piece. You do several of these at once, adding just enough twist to the thread to keep the individual strands of caterpillar spit together.

This is what it looks like in Thailand:




This is how you get the diaphanous, thin, fine threads that you make things like silk gauze out of. Now, there's a couple other methods to getting silk thread out of cocoons. The first is you use tiny tiny pieces of silk, in a staple (aka individual hair) length similar to REALLY good wool, or you use silk caps, which are a stack of about sixty or so cocoons, cut open, spread over a board and allowed to dry. Neither of these methods produce really fine thread, so I assume that on Gor, their silkmoth-analogue cocoons are unwound strand by strand.

These are jobs that women do. That have high value, because they produce luxury items. And women in this type of culture DO these jobs because it makes them valuable. Just as men slay dragons because it makes them valuable to the village, women knit shawls and weave wedding veils.

When we got industry that could do these jobs for us? We dumped most of them on the industry, because HOLY FUCK, if you don't have an aptitude for it, spinning and knitting can be FUCKING BORING. If you like it, you are as sad and twisted as I am and a part of you knows it.

But again: GOR DOES NOT HAVE THESE INDUSTRIES. There IS a job for women to do here that has value, and it's not sitting pretty on Terl Cabot's arm. And because "Slave training" does not include "How to use a drop/supported spindle" (There is no way in FUCK Gor has a decent wheel. Otherwise the girls would be tripping over them every ninety minutes) I HAD assumed that the free women were doing it.

Apparently, they are not.

Also, also? Yo, John?

there are often public slaves who tend the central kitchens in cylinders, care for the children, but may not instruct them,

Yeah. They're gonna teach the children. You can't not teach children if you take care of them.

OH, and this is the VERY FIRST MENTION OF CHILDREN IN THIS SERIES. I think they've been keeping them in the textile mills, right next to the spinning wheels.

Thirdly?

Such girls, also, have a low use-rent, payable to the city, should young males wish to partake of their pleasures. Here again, the mere word of the free person, that he is not completely pleased, is enough to earn the miserable girl a severe beating.

Thank you for supporting state-financed prostitution. AND RAPE.

This whole passage SCREAMS "I DO NOT UNDERSTAND HOW WORK GETS DONE IN ANY SOCIETY", actually. Apparently the only people who do ANY real menial work are slaves.

And again, textile production and food production are MENIAL TASKS in this society level. SO WHY ARE THE SLAVES NOT TRAINED IN THIS? Jesus Christ, even a pleasure slave isn't going to be fucking all the live long day. They've got 'em ironing shirts and washing them. Give Strawchick a spindle and a set amount of shit to produce, and she'd stay in one room all day long with no danger of escape.

Oh, and ONE BEATING and ONE TRIP TO THE PENTALY BOX has cued Srawchick of her lying, her stealing and her pride. Right. Well, we needed a Psychology Fail merit badge to add to the collection, didn't we, John? Oh, wait. Strawchick is still proud to be a virgin.

...well, we haven't seen Rask around in a while, anyway.

So she's all dolled up, and of course she hates every minute of it, and forced to wear earrings, of all humiliating things, and shipped off to the master's tent, where she's forced to dance. And the whole dancing scene?

It's. Awesome.

The energy in it, the momentum, the internal monolouge in Strawchick's head, it all works. If the whole book were like this I'd be screaming READ THIS SHIT from the rooftops, even with the misogyny. WHY IS THE WHOLE BOOK NOT LIKE THIS SCENE?

Of course, Norman has to ruin it:

“Of course,” said Ute. “They are men. Too, do not fret. You will come to be pleased that they so strip you, and look forward to it. It is quite a compliment to a woman. She should be flattered.

Yeah. I should be flattered that somebody I don't know finds me pretty enough to assault me. No, thank you, John.

After the dance, Ute dolls her back up and she's sent off to Rask's tent. Strawchick warms up some wine, and there is this one sentence that stands out:

I saw my reflection in the redness, the blondness of my hair, dark in the wine, and the collar, with its bells, about my throat.

Syntax? Sucks. Structure? Double suck. Image expressed? I. LOVE. IT. Seriously, we've gone from UTTER FAIL to these momentary stepping stones of quality. Ute's character, the dancing scene, a couple descrptive sentences...it's like I've wandered off into a different book or something.

Oh, don't get me wrong. The suck is still there.

I did so, and he, spilling some from the broad rim of the crater, I feeling it on my chin, and throat, as it trickled under the collar, and body, poured the remainder of the wine down my throat.

WHAT THE FUCK DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?

So there are sweet, seductive moments, and I'm actively enjoying this scene...and then Strawchick opens her mouth and, using about five hundred words, tells Rask what essentially boils down to "fuck you."

It does not end well.

END OF CHAPTER.

Captive of Gor chapter Eleven

So if you remember the last two chapters, Strawchick AKA Elinor Brinton has been abducted from her slaver owner by Panther Girls (aka wild things) and sold to a dude who called her Cookie, symbolically burned her Last Posession From Earth, and almost got eaten by Cookie-man's giant talking man eating pet before running out into the Goren wilderness, bare-ass naked, to be eaten and devoured by the Things of the Night?

How does she make it back to her slaver owner, Targo/Torgo? We never find out, because the next chapter opens with her getting her ears pierced.

First of all, I understand wanting to skip the boring parts and not wanting Strawchick to wander around in the fucking woods by herself again, but John? Dude? There is no way in fuck Strawchick survived the woods naked on her own. Girlfriend is dumber than a bag of rocks on acid and BTW I still haven't forgive you for the Random Talking Bear-Monster-Thing. I might have two X chromasomes instead of your preffered target audience of XY, but I AM smarter than this.

Second...Strawchick was a model on Earth in the same era, or thereabouts, as Edie Sedgwick. Let me remind you what Edie Sedgwick looked like:

Those things? On her ears there? Those are earrings. And one of the trademarks in the seventies were earrings pretty much like what Edie's rockin' in that picture up there. So why are you asking me to believe that a model from the seventies would not have had her ears pierced LONG before she became a Gorean love-slave?

But hey, I'm expecting logic from a guy who wrote this sentence:

There were tears in my eyes, for my eyes smarted.

Because it'd be really weird if your knees were weeping, I guess. Moving on.

ALL the other girls are upset. Apparently pierced ears are a Slave Mark above and beyond the branding every girl got when she entered this lovely club, and NOBODY in this group, other than Earth-Girl-Is-Easy Strawchick is willing to go under the needle.

You know? A lot of the "customs" I've seen in this book so far? Have something similar on Earth. And there is nothing in this book so far that is not something seen in Caucasian culture, or something that we White Folks haven't absconded with and then bastardized. There's a great essay on cultural perspective that kind of makes me realize how very, very, VERY lazy this is (not that I'm any better, mind). The ear piercing thing is just kind of the last straw. It's a little like how sci-fi books mention MODERN masters and then Random Name, to sell that Random Name is just as good as Shakespere and Stephen King. Here's this cultural thing that is common on Earth that has a completely different meaning here. Because women only wear decorations for men. 

Now we take a long break from screaming slave girls to discuss the Culture and History of Turia. Which I don't care about. NEXT!

The girls are being kept in pens for training. Oh, hey, we haven't murdered many commas in this chapter. This needs to be fixed:

When released from the pens a girl is almost always desperately eager to please her master, that she not be returned to them, for further training.

These cages are heavily barred, and the bars are rather, irritatingly, widely set, but we cannot squeeze between them.

That's better. Damn, those uppety commas. If we don't practice decimation they might get uppety and start asking for equal rights! Keep 'em barefoot and in the sentence fragments, I say.

Oh, hey, Strawchick wasn't actually degraded by having her ears pierced. Let's do her nose, too! Equality among the sexes slaves is always a good thing.

So there is a discussion of training, and of what the girls eat (Stew) and of more training, and more of what th girls eat (stew) and...okay. This has to be addressed.

Steve Brust is a writer I love, and I actually got to meet the man personally a couple years back. One of the best pieces of world building advice he gave me (...and the room full of people around me, because this was not actually my question) was that you start with the food. So the endless descriptions of slave fare COULD be serving this purpose...

...but it's not. Because "start with the food" IMHO means you first look at the land your characters live on, what could grow in that ecology, what they would have to do to produce those staples in sustaniable levels, and what jobs this industry would create in their community. As an example, the world of Rise of the Winterlord and Prince of the Gray Keep (Due out in December. End needless self promotion) the Gray islands are...well, islands. In a cold zone (I'd say north, but...um, not exactly.) The islands aren't majorly small (Hawaii to Indonesia size) but have a tiny growing season. They can grow a wheat-analogue, but the growing window is pathetic. Bread is a luxury. Mostly they eat sea-based products (Deepwater fish and seaweed. They have limited access to shellfish and the products of a reef-type ecology) or things that can grow well when its so cold outside, spit goes "clink". Five hundred years down the line from Rise, the Isles have a highly developed import/export culture...but their biggest import is still grains, and their biggest exports are plant-based oil (olive oil analogue) and products from a fungus that grows on the oil plants.

The girls on Gor? Eat stew with bread.

And the entire fucking universe breaks down once you start thinking about it.

The stew? I'll buy that. Stew is stew, you throw water, meat and some potato/carrot/cellery analogue into a pot, add salt, you get stew. But Bread? Gor might have bread, but if Gor does have bread, it is too valuable to give to slaves.

Here's what you need to have for bread to be a cheap thing: You need to have farms, and I mean massive, mass-production, be-careful-or-we'll-repeat-the-dust-bowl kind of farms. Also, the technology that makes large-scale farming a posibility. Plows. Things that can use plows, that aren't going to eat you or your children. Graineries. Flour mills. Bakeries. None of which are described even once. We get slaves and slave pens and descriptions of breif clothing (rather than brief descriptions of clothing) but not one description of waving fields of wheat-analogue. Do you know why America is memorialized for "amber waves of grain?" because those endless fields of wheat means we have enough grain to make bread that make bread-lines a possibility. Do you know why "Let them eat Cake!" got Marie Antwonette cut down a few notches? Because there was a drought and France's crops failed and they didn't have the wheat to make bread. A lot of the riots of the french revolution? Were about getting their hands on flour. 

I'd also go as far to say that Gorean social structure, which has NO emphasis on family whatsoever, does not support farm as an industry. Gender ideology aside, farming requires a family. Farming requires a large family that does not need to be paid a standard wage. The reason why farm wives had ten kids? At about six, sprog number ten becomes another pair of hands during Planting Season and Harvest Season. Slaves on Gor are not viewed as potential baby-making machines, but rather as toys for the sexy-sexy. If you had farmers on Gor they'd be looking at women's hips in terms of child-bearing and not how many times they could play hide the salami.


If wheat-analogue is scarce and the bread-making industry is so small it doesn't appear in this book even once (Seriously, John. How hard would it be to thread in one description of a bakery?) then bread becomes valuable. Too valuable to be given to slaves.

Oh, and one more thing? Do you know why women are historically bakers? Because it's a lot of labor. A LOT. OF. LABOR. And it is best accomplished on a large scale when you have all the population working at it, rather than just half. Men can do the outdoor half, women can do the indoor half, and twice the work gets done. Twice the work=bread on a large scale. And the chicks in this book? Are not working. They are sex toys for men. They are either slaves for the sexy-sexy, Free Companions chosen for the sexy-sexy, or cloistered virgins awaiting their chance at the sexy-sexy.

In short? Gor is a hunter-gatherer society, not a farming one. By giving his slave girls a staple common to Earth society where women are free to work themselves into an early grave, John has broken his universe.

And the worst part? he is dedicating pages to food porn. And unlike Hunger Games and Sunshine, because John wants to degrade his slave girls, the food porn isn't very porny. Accurate depiction of bread in this kind of society? The part in Hunger Games where Katniss and Gale go bananas over a couple whole wheat rolls, and the part where Peeta, the baker's son, admits that the only bread his family, the baker's own family, can afford to eat is stale. Not "EW MORE BREAD GIMME ANOTHER PASTRY". (Jesus. They don't have farms and they're feeding "female animals" pastries.)

I know it's a small point, I know it doesn't really matter that much in the scale of things here, but for fuck's sake, the man is dedicating pages to something that breaks his whole universe.

And that whole rant about wheat? Is more interesting than reading about slave guards playing grab-ass with Strawchick, which is what I've been doing for the last few pages.

I had found, over the recent weeks of my bondage, to my fury, that men were becoming ever more interesting and attractive to me. How this thought angered me! I must struggle against it! Part of this was doubtless simply because I was in bondage and the effect of this on a female is no secret. She is dressed, if dressed, in a certain way, which excites both her and men; she must obey; she is familiar with bonds and being made helpless, which, aside from the security involved, impresses the mastery upon her and is sexually stimulating; she is vulnerable, and she is, for most practical purposes, legally and institutionally accessible, accessible as a female; indeed, legally and institutionally, as she is an animal in the eyes of the law, she is literally, and thus is accessible as, literally, a female animal; certainly she is owned, and she knows, particularly if she is a pleasure slave, that she is intended for, is seen in terms of, and exists for, the pleasures of men. That is her raison d’être, to serve and please men. It is hard then not to see men as her masters, for that is what they are; and she naturally, ineluctably, finds them attractive, men strong enough to command her, and do with her as they wish.

First of all, is it just me? Or halfway through that paragraph (which is in itself half a paragraph) did this stop being Strawchick's internal thoughts and turn into John Norman ranting? Also, there's this one "sentence" that...oh, fuck it. Here it is again:

She is dressed, if dressed, in a certain way, which excites both her and men; she must obey; she is familiar with bonds and being made helpless, which, aside from the security involved, impresses the mastery upon her and is sexually stimulating; she is vulnerable, and she is, for most practical purposes, legally and institutionally accessible, accessible as a female; indeed, legally and institutionally, as she is an animal in the eyes of the law, she is literally, and thus is accessible as, literally, a female animal; certainly she is owned, and she knows, particularly if she is a pleasure slave, that she is intended for, is seen in terms of, and exists for, the pleasures of men.

Apparently the humble comma has become an endangered species. John has moved on to wholesale slaughter of the semi-colon.

Also, and I might be wrong in this, but I think most of Norman's later Gor Novels were self-published. This was not one of them. I've tried not to go with the whole "A real editor somewhere approved this" because my stuff got rejected wholesale and with prejudice, and that means I've got no room to talk about shitty writing, but I have to say it here. Somebody read this sentence. Somebody with grammer training. Somebody whose job it is to look at sentences and fix them. They saw that lovely train wreck up there and left it alone. 

The scarier alternative--which I've seen comparing the published version of Twilight with the ARC--is that the train wreck is an attempt to fix an even bigger train wreck.

So the Guards are lusting after Strawchick and Strawchick is lusting after the guards, and I'm back to trying to find the plot instead of picking at the shitty writing. And...oh yeah. I forgot about this part.

The thing that I hate most about this book? It's not the shitty writing. I actually kind of like that. It's not the rampant mysogyny, the racism, the terrible worldbuilding, the lack of logic. Really, all these things are icing on the crazy cake and something that is fun to bitch about.

But to me, the heart of any book are the characters. I love Sunshine because Rae Seddon IS TOTALLY WHO I AM and the people around her ARE TOTALLY MY FAMILY. I love the Mercedes Thompson books because Mercy kicks ass, and it'll probably be yours. I love Hunger Games because CinnaKatnessGalePeetaJohannaFennickAnnie RUE! (sobs!) and I squee over every encarnation of Sherlock Holmes I've ever met because he is just that awesome. Even Twilight is redeemed by Alice, who should have been the main character of the series if there were any justice in the world.

The characters in Captive of Gor are all, every one of them, right down to the most minor character you can imagine, terrible people. The only thing that should happen to Gor is carpet nuclear bombardment. Not because of the slavery, the mysogyny, or the rampant stupdity, but because of the utter lack of anything remotely resembling moral character. None of these people are good, and the only lucky thing about this series is it is all fiction.

Two characters I may have mentioned in passing are Ute and Inge, fellow slave girls and Strawchick's sort-of friends. Ute, especially, has been Strawchick's comforter. The one who pets her head and tells her everything will be alright. Right now, Strawchick is sharing a pen with Ute, Inge and Lana, who is basically Strawchick 2.0. Ute and Inge clean the pen, Lana and Strawchick do not. Ute and Inge ask Lana and Strawchick to help clean the pen, and they refuse because they are far too valuable.

Here is what a sane person does: clean the pen, because otherwise you'll be beaten, and withdraw the friendship from this terrible woman, who is taking a great deal of comfort from your kindness and who doesn't deserve a single ounce of your time.

What do the ONLY two nice people in this book do?

Tie Lana and Strawchick's nose rings together and then torture them with the string. After the cage is cleaned, the two formerly nice people tie Lana and Strawchick to the cell bars by the nose ring and leave them there, all day.

From this point on the interactions with the other girls and Strawchick are basically catfights, followed by exceptional cruelty, followed by pretend kindness, followed by mind numbingly stupid betrayal, followed by something that straddles make-up sex so firmly those paragraphs should have their own dildo. Also, Strawchick lies, gets caught lying, gets a reputation for being a liar and hates how everyone else views her. She's better than that.

This is a real attitude that real people have. I'm dealing with several people like that at my job. I don't get it at all. I get it when the rep is because of gossip and isn't true, but when you know you earned it, why do you hate that people see the real you?

Back to review.

...oh for fuck's sake.

My thoughts strayed back to that terrible night, when I fled from the hut, into the darkness, leaving the beast feeding on the carcass of the destroyed, bloodied sleen.

NO. This goes back at the beginning of the chapter. I've just read six pages about cat fights, lying slaves and girls being tied up by their hair that I didn't bother blogging about because it was that boring. I don't care about how she got back to the slave chain now. I want her to get out of the slave pens and on with the story.

Nope. Basically, Strawchick wandered around in the murder forest until she stumbled upon a member of Targo's team, who stayed behind while everybody else went on to Koroba. Ah, well. At least he didn't chase her with his space ship.

And then the flashforward is over and Strawchick rambles on about how Women Are Natural Slaves, and then we find out that Verna the Panther Girl has been captured by a character from the first Gor book. And Targo's hundred girls are on their way! Have we forgotten about them? I sure had. Also, Rask is attacking Places. The outlaw. Who was mentioned once, a long time ago, back when Strawchick met Torgo.

God, this chapter is long.

And we get a recap of how Rask attacked Torgo, because even John Norman knows its been too long for us to remember who the fuck this guy is.

THIS CHAPTER IS WAY TOO LONG.

But there is one plus. This line of description:

...only the wild, bleak crags of the scarlet Voltai...

Is a few letters away from being the best Twilight/Gor Crossover EVER.

...the wild, deep craigs of the scarlet Volturi. And I would totally pay money for a cage match between Tarl Cabot and Aro. Strawchick can be Bella's first meal post vamping.

 Oh, and you know how Strawchick is scared of men?

Women, it was said, had special reason to fear Rask of Treve. It was said he had a gargantuan contempt, and appetite, for them. It was said that when he used a woman, he then branded her, with his name, as though she, once used, no matter to whom she might afterwards be given or sold, could truly belong only to him. It was also said that he would use a woman only once, claiming that he had, he, Rask of Treve, in once using her, emptied her, exhausted her, taken from her all she had to give, and that, thus, she could no longer be of interest to him.

Wanna take bets on who her master will be? Oh, and after all that description, Strawchick gets a random mysterious male visitor!

Once, there was a visitor to the pens, a tall stranger, partially hooded, who wore robes of blue and yellow silk, those of the Slavers. He had, over his left eye, a strip of leather, which was wound about his head. He was shown through our section of the pens by Targo.

Gee, I wonder who this could be! We're not going to find out. Instead Ute and Inge, realizing that Strawchick is a terrible human being, stop wasting time on her, and she has to beg Lana for friendship. Lana, of course, uses Strawchick for favors and extra food. They deserve each other. Strawchick then dreams about her MYSTERIOUS VISITOR. AND THEN...end chapter, THANK YOU GOD.

TOMORROW: ...I hate this fucking chapter with the fire and passion of ten thousand suns. All I had to do was see the title, and I now have the frantic urge to start rocking in a corner. STRAWCHICK PICKS BERRIES! CW GOES FUCKING INSANE!