(no subject)

[quigonejinn]

Read the first one tonight in a single, sustained sprint of three hours or so, then spoiled myself stupid on Wikipedia. and am now up at 3:00 AM in the morning.

The first book, at least, is everything that it's marked up to be, with tight, tight plotting, believable consequences, and an intro chapter that I need to go back and dissect when I have some critical distance from the book. And I mean, someday, someone will write an ass-kicking female protagonist where romance is not even vaguely part of the plot, besides Azula-of-my-Heart, what do you mean, she wasn't a protagonist, pistols at dawn, but I'll live, I think, because the rest of the book is so good and, also, because the matter is presented in a complicated, believable way.

The only other comment I have is: dude, Collins, did you just make the only black dude of note in the book a big, scary, super-strong field hand? Who is good at choking white girls? Who is not, maybe, the most eloquent? I mean, I know you didn't make him stupid and in fact, make him pretty savvy, and you give him a great moment full of honor and redemption, and at least you had District 11 as grain fields and orchards rather than in cotton fields, but oi. Think about it next time. You probably not quite as hard as ol' Mitt ought to think about things, but a little bit more than you did.

Comments

[sinope]

Arya Stark, in a Song of Ice and Fire! Totally awesome and ass-kicking, totally not involved in any romance!

And yes to all your comments on Hunger Games. :-)

[quigonejinn]

Oh man. Oh man. I have so many issues when reading Arya in ASOIAF Arya. Not in and of herself, but I can't get through an Arya section without yelling a lot about how none of it is making me forgive GRRM for the way he writes the other women in the books, particularly Sansa, and it makes me unable to even see the ass-kickery because I am so BLIND WITH RAGE.

[sinope]

Wait, so your issues are really the fact that the other characters have issues?

I dunno. I mean, I'd be curious to hear what pisses you off so much about them. I'm normally pretty sensitive to gender issues in books, but I actually loved ASOIAF precisely for that reason: there were women with as much variety in personality and goals and agency as the men (given the limitations of a society that's still inherently sexist). Some of them were smart, some were dumb as rocks; some challenged "traditional" gender norms, some embraced them; but all of them were real people with desires and goals, subjects rather than objects.

That said, it's been a few years since I read the books. Is it possible for you to summarize (or link to someone who discusses) your issues with them?

[ferricent]

2nding this I would also like to hear your thoughts.