Why Does The (Name of the Wind) Blow–Part One

Ronan Wills has finished his rolling commentary on The Name of the Wind, the first book in Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Trilogy. I enjoyed his critique—we share many of the same issues with the book, especially in regards to the plotting, which proceeds at the rate of an exhausted snail trying to make its way through an especially thick spot of molasses.

Wills summed up his commentary with an explanation of exactly where he feels the book went wrong; he argues that overenthusiasm of the Internet sort is one of the reasons that The Name of the Wind was so poorly written, yet so well received. Rothfuss never had to up his game, because he’s dealing with a receptive audience who are willing to overlook a first-time author’s flaws and praise him to the skies.

Here’s where I depart from Wills. That’s just not true. I wish it was true, but it just isn’t so.

Wills’s argument does make sense for many, many sci-fi/fantasy/YA genre authors who are not Patrick Rothfuss. Many authors score publishing contracts once they’ve built up an online following, usually as fanfiction authors—the most famous being E.L. James, but off the top of my head I can think of Cassandra Claire and Naomi Novik, and doubtless there are many other genre authors who started out the same way. These authors gained a loyal pool of readers by writing derivative work of varying levels of shittiness and posting it online for readers to enjoy for free. Publishing houses take chances on these authors because they know that there is a built-in audience for their works, and the authors don’t have to improve their skills because they know that their audience “accepts them for who they are.” In fact, the audience might desert the author if her* style changes, even if it’s technically for the better. These are the sort of authors who are prisoners of their Internet popularity.

That’s not the case with Rothfuss. He went straight into traditional publishing, which means that he didn’t have an established audience who would pay for a book written in that special Rothfuss style. Somebody must have read the manuscript for The Name of the Wind—all the way through—and decided that it was worth an advance, plus the money for marketing, production, and all the other expenses that go into creating and selling a (rather large) book.** Whoever decided to bring this overgrown baby of a book into the world guessed that there would be an audience—and it turns out they were right.

So what does the fantasy reader want? If we use Rothfuss’s body of work, actual and projected, as an example, the fantasy reader wants a long story, spread out over multiple books (at least three). The fantasy reader wants a story with a child or teenage protagonist. The fantasy reader wants a story in which occurrences do not occur too often. These occurrences, despite taking place in an otherworldly setting, should closely mirror the experiences of a Western heterosexual male young adult. Acceptable experiences include thwarted attraction, a comparative lack of money, competing for school grades, and playing the fantasy-world equivalent of the guitar. These experiences should have great narrative import, as they are the most important experiences in the protagonist’s life. All other character experiences should be sourced from Star Wars.

The fantasy reader wants c’o'n’langs. Preferably multiple c’o'n’langs.

Here are some things that the fantasy reader does not want: developed female characters who aren’t attracted to the hero; developed male characters who aren’t the hero; a finished story.

The Name of the Wind was never meant as a stepping stone from community popularity to the “big time.” It was marketed as the best the genre could offer. Rothfuss is meant to be fantasy’s Venus, emerging be-bearded from a sea of similar three-volume doorstoppers.

And it worked. Rothfuss’s publisher, Tor, apparently knows its readers better than they know themselves.Then again, even the biggest marketing machine can fail. Something must have set Rothfuss’s work apart from its competitors—beyond the young adult outlook, similiarity to “real life” and lingwistik complexity—to make it so popular with critics and readers.

Conjectures why in the next post.

* It really is always a she, as far as I can tell.

** As far as I can tell, Rothfuss published exactly one work–online or in print–before receiving a contract for his trilogy. It was a reworking of part of the larger Story o’ Kvothe called “The Road to Levinshir” and it won the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future contest in 2002. Presumably the win gave him connections, but I’m still surprised that he would land a contract for three large books on the strength of one contest win alone.

Melusine and the romance of victimhood

I picked up Sarah Monette’s Melusine at the library, on the “recommendation” of this review. I admit I was tempted because I wanted to see how bad things got.

Here’s one thing I have to get out of the way first. Melusine is advertised as a gay romance. Melusine is definitely not a gay romance. There’s exactly one non-abusive sexual relationship between men in the whole book, and it’s broken up in the very first pages.* There are, of course, plenty of men forcing boys into child prostitution, men committing physical abuse against other men, and men coercing other men into sex acts. None of this is portrayed as part of a sexual fantasy where somehow there’s no harm and no foul, it’s all meant to be physically and mentally harmful to the victim. It’s a little like Sebastiane if somebody removed all the nasty kinky parts where men enjoy fucking each other and just left in the part with the arrows.

One of the two protagonists, Felix, is attracted to men. Felix is also described as clever, handsome, and very powerful, but he’s like this for about five pages before somebody exposes his Dreadful Past, which forces him to sexually degrade himself and eventually be Power Raped by his evil mentor during a magic rite, driving him into lovingly detailed bouts of madness that leave him helpless and infantilized.*

Once Felix is Power Raped, almost everyone he meets mistrusts and abuses him, even when it’s in their own best interest to treat him well. Example: Felix’s fellow wizards find him unable to speak or work magic in the company of his evil mentor, who is also a foreigner running off to an enemy capital after the destruction of the city of Melusine’s most potent magical artifact. Do the wizards bother to detain this man or examine whether Felix is under compulsion? No, because then they couldn’t sneer at him and send him to a creepy madhouse and sneer at him some more! This pattern repeats over and over—Felix manifests symptoms that are obviously a sign of compulsion or a change in his magic powers, yet the other characters ignore him and are obviously meant to be Bad.

A few characters display kindness towards Felix, most importantly Mildmay, fellow narrator and Felix’s long-lost sibling. Like Felix, Mildmay has a Dreadful Past—he was raised in a gang of child thieves and became a pickpocket, cardsharp, and assassin, complete with horrific, painful punishment curse for his crimes. However, once Mildmay encounters Felix, he feels compelled to take care of him, because Felix’s pain is so compelling and pure that it trumps everything else the presumably highly experienced Mildmay has ever seen in his life.**

Melusine does involve a romance, but it’s the romance of victimhood, where suffering is a sign of purity and goodness and a sort of aphrodesiac. Felix is a good person because bad people hate and persecute him, not because he demonstrates himself to be particularly smart, or clever, or kind.*** The blurbs on Melusine‘s cover compare it to Jacqueline Carey’s books, presumably because there’s “nontraditional” (whatever that means) sex involved, but I was reminded of Anne Bishop’s Black Jewels trilogy, which also has a protagonist whose main purpose is to be ultra-special and powerful while not doing much of anything at all except being a human litmus test (bad people hate the protagonist and want to kill them, and good people fall at their feet and worship their specialness and defend them against the bad people). It’s the ultimate devotion fantasy, in that the protagonist doesn’t have to do anything but suffer, beautifully, and this earns them the full devotion of the redeemable parts of the world world. Again, Sebastiane, except that St. Sebastian bothered to tell off the Roman emperor and did eventually die (if not from all those arrows).

This victimhood fantasy is very feminine, in that the protagonist isn’t supposed to, well, do anything except absorb the world’s blows. Their passivity reveals their goodness (in a book with a female protagonist, the reactive, passive heroine is usually contrasted with an active bitch of an antagonist, as if action makes a woman repellant). The protagonist’s very appearance and manner is supposed to reveal his or her superiority, without the need for any sort of corrupting action or decision on his or her part. Felix isn’t a man who wants to have sex with other man, he’s the traditional goddess-who-needs-constant-rescue in a man’s body. That homosexuality somehow gets conflated with this fantasy of passivity is just depressing for men and women both.

I don’t think I’m going to go on with the series, but apparently it ends with more gang rape and with the two brothers raping each other? Or something? Because it’s a world of rape magic? I don’t know, man. I just… I mean, even Danny de Vito knows that shit is wrong.

 

Just two men like loving brothers!

 

* The only fully portrayed romantic relationship is heterosexual, although the woman is portrayed as untrustworthy and ends up dead for no particular reason. But nobody rapes her! So that’s good!

** This pattern only changes near the end of the book, when Felix gets his magic powers back and the position of poor accused woobie falls to Mildmay. After a long quest, Felix and Mildmay are rescued from a storm by some magic types with cod-Greek names who somehow know that Mildmay is a murderer. Instead of being surprised that complete strangers on the other side of the world know about his past, Mildmay immediately begins to have the sad feelings, as if he just naturally expects to be abhorred. He also suddenly thinks of himself as his brother’s natural inferior, instead being of half-cowed, half-repelled by his brother’s upper-class manners. This is also after Felix feels desire towards Mildmay, feminizing him. Oh, this book is creepy.

*** He is hot, which seems to be a requirement for the ultravictim. Ugly people still look gross when they cry and suffer!

I’m a mean jackass, but I am suspicious

I’m a mean jackass, but I am suspicious of Angelina Jolie’s double mastectomy announcement.

Or rather, I’m suspicious because of all the issues surrounding the announcement. I don’t have a problem with Jolie herself–I don’t think she’s the best actress but I don’t think she was a useless human being until today or that what she’s done is wrong. That said, I’m not sure if I want to know what’s going to come out of this.

First of all, the rhetoric surrounding breast cancer treatment is insane. Not only do women with breast cancer have to deal with being sick, they have to deal with all these weird gendered body issues as well. Now you can have these problems without even having cancer! If you have this gene, you must have your breasts cut off and have what’s left reshaped into new, better breasts. I don’t know whether it’s really necessary to take the breasts off–it’s probably better in the long run, but the point is not that you are going to live, you are going to live to get new breasts afterwards that look almost like the old ones, goddammit. And the emphasis is always on how the breasts will look good afterwards and not frighten children or the sensitive eyes of men—nobody ever talks about how you are now stuck with unfeeling breasts, because it would be gross and greedy to miss having functioning erogenous zones. And nobody ever talks about the ovaries, because they’re on the inside, with all the guts and poop and other nasty, unwomanly stuff. Never mind the realities of biological womanhood, let’s stick with what we can see and paint pink. 

Also, you must be thin, because otherwise you will get cancer from your fat. And you have to be happy, because otherwise your sad vibes will give you cancer. And this and that and the other thing, and these things change all the time with advancing medical research (except, conveniently, the parts about being thin and cheery).

Jolie’s statement reinforces all this–the idea that the most important thing of all is to look good after surgery, not feel good, and to make yourself sweet for other people. All while you are under a hell of a lot of stress, because a woman can be a raving bitch while she’s well but god forbid she have the sads when she’s sick. That’s a downer!

There’s also the idea that this will boost testing in women who may not need testing. The rhetoric surrounding breast cancer spurs a similarly insane amount of marketing. This fits in very well with the American medical establishment—which pays by service done, so there’s always pressure to do more procedures to turn a profit. The more people who undergo testing, the better, which is why you can get a full-body MRI test done just like you’d get a full-body wash and wax for a car. (Jolie’s clinic, the Pink Lotus Breast Center, is opening up an online service, so you can pay for their services without ever entering a real clinic—and they’ve already got Jolie’s operation details off, so you can have your tits taken off like just like hers, if you like.) However, once the patient’s had the procedure, they’re at risk of higher insurance premiums, and the insurance might not pay for the procedure anyway, so it degenerates into a mud pit match between the medical provider, the insurer, and the patient. But the system has to keep itself going, so tests and bills it is.

On a completely different note: what’s with Jolie having her surgery for her children? Whenever I read about women having purely cosmetic surgery, they’re always “doing it for themselves.” But when they’re having surgery for non-cosmetic reasons, they’re “doing it for their children.”  I’ve never had cosmetic surgery, but when, say, I put on lipstick or mascara, I’m doing it for other people, because I want to look a certain way and have other people see me that way.* I’ve also never had major surgery, but if I did, I’d do it for myself, because I’d rather be alive than dead, children or no. That doesn’t seem particularly selfish to me. I understand that seeing children grow up is important, but if you don’t have kids or if you have other priorities or even if your kids are terrible screaming demonspawn like Damien and Rosemary’s baby** and you secretly want them to die, you still deserve to live for yourself! Please, don’t fake the self-sacrifice, ladies.

* This doesn’t mean that I don’t expect respect from other people or that I want to please everyone on earth, just that I don’t exist in a vacuum. There are people out there who become their own catwalk, but sadly we can’t all be Little Edie Beale.

** Although wasn’t Damien actually rather quiet? 

Mary Beard and the question of liking what you like to wear

Mary Beard, famous Cambridge scholar of antiquity, has written an article about her love of shoes (warning: Daily Mail link). This has caused some response because apparently women are not supposed to write about shoes, because it makes them look silly. I think it’s silly to think that women have ever written about shoes in the first place.

Think about it. Online commerce has made it so that anyone with enough money and a working Internet connection can order whatever kind of shoes they like, from cheap fast fashion to handcrafted leather creations. You can get vegan shoes. You can get shoes with shock absorbers. You can get shoes with deadly spikes coming out of the sides. You can get historically accurate recreations of 18th- and 19th-century shoe styles (here are some Western examples). There are even sites where you can design your own shoes—if you want a shiny gold pump with a heel striped like a Christmas cane and a fuzzy platform sole, you can have it done. If you love shoes, there has never been a better time to be alive. I am not sure if it is possible to be addicted to shopping for shoes, but if it is there has never been a more dangerous time to be alive.

I have never read a news article about a woman who actually likes shoes.

Whenever these articles about “shoe addicts” come out, the women are always interested the same damn brands—Jimmy Choo, Manolo Blahnik, Stella McCartney, and so on—the very feminine ones that “every woman” has heard of and, not coincidentally, the most expensive ones. Saying that you like these brands is the equivalent of saying that you are are a movie buff because you’ve seen Star Wars or an expert Chinese chef because you nuked some leftover kung pao chicken last night. A woman who genuinely was interested in shoes and wanted to write about them would know of some other brands.**

Of course that’s not the point of these articles. The point is to define yourself in a certain way. Mary Beard is saying that she likes shoes, but that’s the shorthand. There’s several statements packed in there, all part of a projected self-image. I am conventionally feminine and I know which brands are associated with “feminine.” I want to be younger than I am. I don’t like my body. I know that people will think I am vain for liking shoes, so I will attempt to show that I am serious by throwing in some dubious links to theory. I am still ashamed to make purchases that my husband would disapprove of. I am like you, or like the you you are supposed to be. I desire the right things. Don’t be threatened by me.

The question I have to ask—why on earth would I care whether Mary Beard is girly and charming or not? She makes documentaries about the ancient Romans, for god’s sake. I guess the answer is so that I’ll be annoyed at her and write about her, and gather publicity for her and the Daily Mail.*** In which case, it worked—but why did she have to do it at the expense of the poor shoes? Their reputation is bad enough as it is.

* Beard’s upper limit for her shoe purchases is about $450, the discount rate. These sorts of shoes are like cars, in that you’re not supposed to buy them at the sticker price, which can run over a thousand dollars.

** I’ve never seen this done—I would guess it’s because it makes the woman into too much of an individual, with her own likes (and, even more frightening, dislikes!) The point isn’t sharing knowledge or particular desire, it’s creating a safe self-definition.

*** According to Beard, she wrote the article partly because she was going to have an article written about her shoes anyway, and she’d rather control the conversation about herself. However, it’s a conversation about shoes. What on earth did she have on her feet that required the original, preempted article, anyway—horns from endangered elephants? Dildos? Children’s skin? And was this presumably nasty original article going to be run the Mail? I can’t think of a worse fate than trying to avert the sour judgment of Daily Mail (or DAILY FAIL, AMIRITE?) readers.

House of Cards, the crap version

Linking to Dan Hemmens’s takedown of the American version of House of Cards. I’m a big fan of the original series and was disappointed in the American version, for many of the reasons that Hemmens lists.

I have to add one observation–Hemmens notes that Uruqhart’s affability seduces the audience (as opposed to Underwood’s snarling big-boy act–Spacey makes evil seem so stressful), but he misses the difference between Uruqhart and Underwood’s victims, which is just as important. Many of Uruqhart’s victims are one-dimensional Tory scum–there’s the ultra-moronic one, the Jewish wet, the closety one, and the loud one that has to buy his own furniture. All of these men are at least as sleazy as Uruqhart, if not as clever, and it’s enjoyable to watch Uruqhart make ‘em jump.

Underwood’s victims are teachers and dock workers, salt-of-the-earth stereotypes who are thrown into poverty through Underwood’s machinations. Even the congressman that he kills is a weak but nice guy who loves his momma and his children. Either the writers couldn’t get around to creating some hateful politicians for Underwood to bump off, or they genuinely think that Underwood’s screwing over of people with a hell of a lot less privilege than him makes him an admirable badass.* There’s an undercurrent that suggests that these people deserve to lose their livelihoods, because they’re just not as awesome as Underwood. Very different from watching various Tories get theirs. (A relative who enjoyed the Netflix series did so because he thought all Underwood’s deeds were leading up to his inevitable assassination, but presumably that will take another thirteen hours at least. Too long!)

Hemmens mentions that the Netflix series passes the Bechdel test. I give no points to House of Cards on this one. I have a problem with the Bechdel test, because while it does guarantee that men are not the center of a story’s world literally every single second, it doesn’t guarantee that women are portrayed as anything more than rock stupid, catty bitches. If the scenes that pass the Bechdel test are scenes where women catfight over pregnancy leave or spread incorrect information about abortion,** like they are in House of Cards, I’d rather the women just talk about how much they love men and cock and men.

* At some points, Spacey’s Underwood reminded me less of Uruqhart and more of The Thick of It‘s Malcolm Tucker, if The Thick of It was played absolutely not for laughs, ever, at all.

** Underwood’s wife, Claire, visits a fertility clinic near the end of the series. The female doctor there tells her that Claire’s past abortions will make it harder for her to have a child. Abortions, when performed safely, have a very low chance of affecting future fertility, so the medical information is not only incorrect, but it’s incorrect solely to punish Claire’s “bitchy” character for her past decisions (and it’s also silly, because Claire is going through menopause, which is obviously a larger fertility issue than any past abortions).