bogleech:
racieb:
satyrheartbeat:
ninjarobotclone:
ioniconeirologist:
bogleech:
So who wants to complain about Piers Anthony with me
Man, I tell you…
I read probably every Xanth book as a kid (plus a few of his other series that I probably should not have been reading at that age) because all you had to do back then was hand me something somewhere on the fantasy/scifi spectrum and I would gleefully devour it regardless of quality and oblivious to grossness. It’s got magic and dragons and shit, it’s gotta be cool, right??
Much later when I’d gotten older, I started looking back at what I remembered about the series and going “Wow, why the hell was there so much sex?? Especially rapey sex?? Was… was there ever a single female character in any of his books ever who wasn’t a blatant trophy/object/there to make babies so he could write about THOSE kids growing up and having magic sex?”
Kind of a shame, really, since IIRC you’d occasionally bump into things that were actually really interesting or creative concepts/mechanics in his stories, but they’d just be so eclipsed by. Everything else.
And then ONE DAY, someone I knew was absolutely raving about a series of his I’d never read. It was the best thing ever, it changed his life, etc etc etc. I was like fine, I’ll give it a shot. I grabbed the first book from the library and started to read.
It actually made me more uncomfortable than anything else I’d ever read. Like I was legitimately reviled, and I can’t remember ever feeling that way about a book before. It was a concept I would’ve been all over like ants on sugar any other day of the week, but dressed up by extremely boring-ass writing and AverageJoe McHeroDude StraightGuy immediately meeting a gorgeous mysterious trophy woman with a tragic history (that she instantly infodumped on him) and in need of ~*~saving~*~ and uuuuuuuuuuuuuugh. I really, really wondered how a friend I otherwise thought was pretty cool could ever be that into something like this.
welp, sorry for the slight rant, but the topic brought all this bubbling to the forefront of my mind and I figured I’d share since you called for it.
…seriously though, he even explained to us exactly how the magic animated skeletons procreated, just so he could have them do it. And have a human woman awkwardly explain sex to the skeleton, if I’m not mistaken. Don’t even get me started on the love pools or whatever they were called.
motherfuckin cosigned. i too devoured all the xanth books i could get my hands on in high school before suddenly realizing whoops these are actually really shitty and gross
*rides into conversation* THE INCARNATIONS SERIES IS PRETTY GROSS TOO????
Like it has similar problems like Xanath. Including trophy women and them only important for connective continuity. And the male characters???? Like i was only interested in one the others were pretty dry. Everything else was so convoluted and muddy too plot wise.
Yeeeaah I could have just emptyquoted these replies, pretty much identical experiences as my own.
The first thing I started noticing was gross was how often he’d write a child character having a curiosity about sex, and like, that’s a “realistic” thing, yeah, kids wonder where babies come from, why certain things are considered “dirty” and what adults are hiding from them, but when an old man goes way out of his way to contrive a running theme out of that in book after book we have an obvious problem.
And it does suck that on the other hand he actually has some awesome concepts for his universes. I LOVED the setup in Xanth every single person is just born with one utterly random magic power, you can never gain more, and you’re considered a “sorcerer” only if your one power is exceptional enough, like raising the dead or shapeshifting, cause other people have powers like “making noses grow on trees” or “turning cheese into different cheese”
Can someone rip that off for a video game without pedophilia in it?
Another creepy moment that was suppose to be “funny,” I guess: he had this giant snake monster in Xanth, just called the anaconda, who could hypnotize only women to walk into its mouth, which sounds like kind of run-of-the-mill fantasy fare except the reason this worked was that an anaconda kinda looks like a big dick. Seriously, it wasn’t a magical power, the female characters were all just instantly mesmerized by the “symbol of manliness” that was this giant woman-eating snake. and it was up to the men to snap them out of it and shield them from the sight of the huge cock-shaped animal so they wouldn’t stand their drooling over it while it killed them. HAHA, WOMEN, RIGHT?
See, I was initially going to chime in with “at least the computer game was fun”.
But then I remembered that the computer game had that legitimately baffling section where Medea the devil keeps trying to seduce you, and if you let her, it’s implied that she sexes you to death? And then there’s that whole bit where Nada gets captured and you find her in a compromising position, and she tells you not to look, and if you admit to looking you get a game over because she hands you over to Medea?
So there was still some weird shit going on that I didn’t pick up on when I was eight.
I'm really not that boring, I'm headstrong and annoying 