fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #3047 ]

⌈ Secret Post #3047 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[Suzanne from Orange is the New Black]

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[Soul Caliber V]

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(Rick and Morty)

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06.

[Love The Way You Lie - Eminem feat. Rihanna]

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[Bones]

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11. [SPOILERS for Grimm]
[WARNING for rape]

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12. [WARNING for rape]

[Eddie Murphy, Bill Cosby]

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13. [WARNING for incest/underage]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #435.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's not being a sociopath, that's called behaving like a mature adult. It's called not starting fights you don't need to start. It's called not burning your bridges until you've, like, actually gotten across them. It's called diplomacy.

Sociopaths don't have empathy. If you have, and exercise, empathy, you realize that your feelings are not the only feelings that are important, and therefore it's important to avoid openly hurting people un necessarily, not treating other people like human beings with feelings is the quickest and easiest way to make them hate you. Once they hate you, it's highly likely they'll never stop hating you. And the fewer people hate you, the better your life will be.

I'm confused as to how that's a sign of mental illness.

I think the issue with the quote is that it makes the point where you have to stop being nice seem an inevitable part of the relationship.

That's not maturity, that's manipulation.

That depends on what the context of the original quote is, IMO.

I take it then that you're not familiar with LHK's obnixious and self-centred Mary Sues?

Noooooo...<_<

I'd tell you to check them out if only so you have some context as to why people don't think this (or any other "philosophy" her characters espouse) is positive in the slightest, but if you've been lucky enough to avoid them this long then I wouldn't want to inflict them on you.

Let's just say she once wrote an entire short story where her MC spent the whole time listing all the ways she was more amazing and perfect and flawless in every way than her ex-but-not-really's new girlfriend.

This is not someone whose views on interpersonal relationships anyone needs to admire.

Context is a character who's a self-absorbed, hypocritical, hyper-violent rapist who uses people as disposable objects patting herself on the back.

Wow, that's pretty freaky then. Is she deliberately terrible or accidentally so?

It's kind of a weird case - it started off with the character deliberately being written as slowly succumbing to the whole 'we who fight monsters live to become them' thing, then LKH did a 180 and started buying into protagonist-centered morality 100%, so in later books you have the narrative furiously justifying the character pulling the same sort of shit reserved for the villains in the early books.

That sounds like it would be pretty bait-and-switch-y to read.

Probably for anyone who started to read them now, yeah. I picked them up when they were still ridiculous-but-entertaining 90s urban fantasy, so the record-scratch moment hit for me a lot later than it did for people I've spoken to who picked up the series later on.

Just in case you or anyone else is inclined to pick them up for curiousity's sake, I want to stress that the series has always had a pretty high volume of blood and sexual violence. There's more in the later books, because it's not just the villains being horrific, but there honestly isn't a single book in the series I'd recommend to anyone who has squicks or triggers centered around violence or rape.

I doubt I'll ever have any interest in picking them up, but thanks for giving all this information! I wish more people were this helpful in fandom discussions. ;)

It's really sad. The early books were pretty good. It's kind of terrifying seeing an author actually go backwards as far as writing quality, and to such a severe extent.

Yeah, I agree with you there. I think part of it's probably the Anne Rice effect with regards to popularity and degree of editorial oversight, but it's honestly kind of worrying what a mess her later work turned into.

I'd argue that the writing quality was never up to much in the first place (see the above comments about repetitive word choices as one example of many reasons why) so there wasn't a noticeable decline there.

What there was, was a major plummeting in storytelling that didn't rely on Godmodding powerups in via Fucktoy Du Jour. The first maybe six or seven AB books at least had some kind of narrative going for them. The MG series was a mess from the start.

(no subject)

(Anonymous) - 2015-05-09 04:15 (UTC) - Expand

(Anonymous) - 2015-05-09 07:59 (UTC) - Expand

lb_lee - 2015-05-09 18:58 (UTC) - Expand

this is a Merry Gentry quote, not an Anita Blake quote... (which has me wtf why everyone is bringing up Anita). MG is a faery princess who has been abused in so many ways and grew up playing deep court politics. Her friends were the servants, not the courtiers. In that context, it makes sense.

Take it out of a deadly political context, it's not that great of an idea.

(Merry also doesn't rape. She does get raped and I almost quit the series after that one. I can't speak for Anita Blake novels. I noped out at Obsidian Butterfly.)

I don't think it's particularly mature to plan every relationship around the possible necessity of destroying the other person, which is what I get from that quote.

It's not the 'being nice' part of the quote that bothers me.

If it's Laurell K. Hamilton, I'm pretty sure what you're getting from the quote is spot on.

There's not a whole lot of empathy apparent in going into relationships with the proviso that you're only being nice for now while it suits you, but you'd be perfectly capable of destroying that person should the need arise.

Uh, I guess I'm not doing a good job of being a mature adult because so far I've failed to "destroy" anyone in my life even if they're not nice to me.

Well, you better get on that. The clock is ticking! ;)

Huh? The approach described by that quote isn't the same thing as diplomacy. Not at all.

I don't think you know anything about adults...

Did you only read the first couple lines of the quote? It's not the whole "be nice" part that anyone's taking issues with. It's the "be nice...until it's time to destroy them!" Mature, empathetic adults generally don't go into relationships thinking, "I may need to destroy this person later."