Yeah. Re the naive-at-best sex positivity, one of the hazards of growing up with no sensible, realistic ethics around sexuality is what happens when you try to come up with rules from scratch, without realizing that all your unexamined biases from your own upbringing and experience are going to go into those rules. The hippie era was full of that kind of stuff.
Normally, I'd agree. But I've seen fen well into the 21st century make the same goddam argument, with the same appeal to writerly authority. Some of them have even posted here from time to time.
Which makes the novel the story of a young woman fleeing her evil mother and finding the strength to defeat her in an evil subculture. Is that really what she intended to write?
In what way is the subculture depicted as anything like as "evil" overall as the mother is? Every subculture I have ever heard of has abuse enablers, unfortunately. That doesn't mean some of them aren't much better than others, in that department and elsewhere.
Well, her fan dad tries raping her drunkenly by page 80. That's not exactly a strong recommendation. His love of science fiction and the bottle are the things which define him.
As for her mother... well, I freely admit I was not in sympathy with this book. It was hard for me not to read it as the story of a troubled young woman who had a mental illness that expressed itself in delusions about her mother and fairies, who believed the world changed ex post facto because of her personal magic.
That doesn't help matters. His love of science fiction is due to witch influence? Is this supposed to be a good thing?
Maybe all of science fiction in that fictional universe is a construction of witch powers to entrap magical practitioners into worlds of delusion and emotional failure. And maybe we're all Starfleet officers who have been deluded by Q.
No, but his being a distant, abusive, alcoholic weak dude is either a) partially because of the abusive family dynamics, or b) because of abusive family dynamics plus magic, depending if you want to take it as a fantasy or not.
(I think it's reasonable to look at it either way, personally.)
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seth ellis (from livejournal.com)2014-06-12 01:21 am (UTC)(link)
I haven't read the book, but this exchange is giving me the impression that her dad is a drunken abuser because it's her mom's fault and she drove him to it, which on the face of it is not a healthy narrative construction. I hope this is not in fact the case.
It's really not clear why he's a drunken abuser. It's clear that the mother is an emotional abuser and manipulator (I think there's enough objective evidence to conclude that that's not all in the narrator's head), and that the narrator vastly prefers the father although she sees some of his faults (and his other faults are clear to the reader despite the narrator's passing over them). Perhaps his faults are caused by the situation he's in, or perhaps his faults lead him into that situation - the text doesn't take a stand on that.
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james_davis_nicoll) wrote2014-06-10 09:02 pm
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As for her mother... well, I freely admit I was not in sympathy with this book. It was hard for me not to read it as the story of a troubled young woman who had a mental illness that expressed itself in delusions about her mother and fairies, who believed the world changed ex post facto because of her personal magic.
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Well, there was the little matter of his entire life being run by witches.
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Maybe all of science fiction in that fictional universe is a construction of witch powers to entrap magical practitioners into worlds of delusion and emotional failure. And maybe we're all Starfleet officers who have been deluded by Q.
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(I think it's reasonable to look at it either way, personally.)
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