What I Hate About Spring
Mar. 17th, 2006 04:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrissaPastels.
Do I look like a delicate @#$%& flower to you?
Only answer that if you have the right answer.
But speaking of delicate @#$&% flowers, I'm amused, because one of my rants came back to inform a bit of subplottiness: I have talked (*cough* all right, raved with borderline coherence) about the fantasy novel trick of attempting to cast the heroine as the ugly duckling and get the reader's sympathy for her as the beautiful swan all at once. This is usually expressed as something like "her chin was too strong for beauty" (because what we all like is girls who are all neck up to their nose) or "her hair was an unfashionable red" (because nobody likes redheads, in the reading audience -- fantasy readers in particular have an irrational hatred of red hair, which is why you will never, ever, ever see anyone at a con who even knows what henna is). And particularly galling, the heroine is stated in authorial voice to be too slender, and that is that, and no one ever grouses about getting her to eat more or treats her like she must be mentally deficient just because she's a thinnish girl with tits who can dress herself and doesn't talk a million miles an hour like coastal people do unless she's really excited about something --
Riiiiiiiight, okay, but returning to the fiction, there are sensible reasons for a society not to prefer skinny people. And some of those are coming up right now and biting my character in the butt, while her sturdier foster-sister is assumed to be both appealing as a mate and highly competent. And without the asides in authorial voice about how so-and-so was too this for that and the other thing. Let the characters do it!
Lazy author types....
Do I look like a delicate @#$%& flower to you?
Only answer that if you have the right answer.
But speaking of delicate @#$&% flowers, I'm amused, because one of my rants came back to inform a bit of subplottiness: I have talked (*cough* all right, raved with borderline coherence) about the fantasy novel trick of attempting to cast the heroine as the ugly duckling and get the reader's sympathy for her as the beautiful swan all at once. This is usually expressed as something like "her chin was too strong for beauty" (because what we all like is girls who are all neck up to their nose) or "her hair was an unfashionable red" (because nobody likes redheads, in the reading audience -- fantasy readers in particular have an irrational hatred of red hair, which is why you will never, ever, ever see anyone at a con who even knows what henna is). And particularly galling, the heroine is stated in authorial voice to be too slender, and that is that, and no one ever grouses about getting her to eat more or treats her like she must be mentally deficient just because she's a thinnish girl with tits who can dress herself and doesn't talk a million miles an hour like coastal people do unless she's really excited about something --
Riiiiiiiight, okay, but returning to the fiction, there are sensible reasons for a society not to prefer skinny people. And some of those are coming up right now and biting my character in the butt, while her sturdier foster-sister is assumed to be both appealing as a mate and highly competent. And without the asides in authorial voice about how so-and-so was too this for that and the other thing. Let the characters do it!
Lazy author types....
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no subject
Date: 2006-03-18 07:03 pm (UTC)