[ SECRET POST #3332 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3332 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
(David Bowie)


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03.
(Great British Bake Off for Sports Relief, Ed Balls)


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04.
[Pokemon]


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05.
[Star Wars: TFA]


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06.
[Damian Lewis, Dick Winters, Band Of Brothers]


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07.
[Daughter of the Lilies]


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08.
[David Eddings]


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09.
[Sengoku Basara]


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10.
[JJBA]


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11.
[Men In Black I, II, III]
















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 022 secrets from Secret Submission Post #476.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[fscom]

08. http://i.imgur.com/SCJD6RI.jpg
[David Eddings]

[iambecomebees]

Oh wow a secret about David Eddings... I still re-read my copies once in a while. I think his treatment of female characters is mostly dated, but yeah... they were all pretty much the same person. The Mallorean was just kinda bad though.

[type_wild]

Polgara will forever be one of my idols, but yeeeeeeah then there were the funky ideas about gender that factored heavily in on how all the other women were portrayed.

[(Anonymous)]

It didn't bother me at first but after a reread or two, I realized just how cookie-cutter his female characters are. Not even Polgara (who I agree is awesome) is entirely immune. They have to be physically attractive, and their looks will be mentioned frequently. Damn near every female character is "feisty", but only in the conventionally acceptable sense, i.e. they argue but also act pouty/flirty in order to get their way with the male characters, and of course, this always succeeds. Eddings seems to prefer his female characters to be beautiful, pouty and child-like to the point where it seems like... eesh.

[atalantapendrag]

His unpleasant attitudes toward women are even more glaring in The Losers.

[(Anonymous)]

I dunno. I want to like Polgara as a character, but it seems to me that Eddings conflates "strong female character" with "bitch" way too often in her case.

[(Anonymous)]

Honestly, I think that's for the best. Let it be justly consigned to oblivion.

[melissatreglia]

Actually, somebody sporked "Pawn of Prophecy" at the LJ comm das-sporking. Chapter by chapter... And I think they're continuing the series.

[(Anonymous)]

I had to google this so I figured I'd post the link to it in case anyone else was curious:

http://das-sporking.livejournal.com/693489.html

[(Anonymous)]

I loved this series when I was a kid and must've reread it half a dozen times but it's one of those fantasy "classics" that doesn't age well, IMO. It's good starter fantasy to get a newbie reader introduced to well known fantasy tropes and cliches, but eventually they'll want more sophisticated plots and characters. Or at least, I hope so.

[(Anonymous)]

Tumblr's favorite thing is to seek out old stuff to label "problematic" tbh

[(Anonymous)]

Yup. Anyone who likes "tumblr style smackdowns" is doing fandom wrong, and is a pretty rotten person in their own right. Tumblr sjw-fandom is actively harming the pursuit of actual social justice because it is so cartoonishly superficial.

[(Anonymous)]

The thing that bothered me most about the female characters (especially Polgara who wanted to be a housewife and make her own soap wtf) was finding out years later that the whole series was co-written by Leigh Eddings, David's wife. What the hell?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, the series began in the early 80s, and for that era, Polgara was what passed as a strong female character. Most of his female characters would've been considered "strong female characters" really, because they weren't simpering, weepy damsels. Hey, Ce'Nedra even gets dressed up in armor and asks for a breastplate with big titties on it because hers aren't big enough. That's feisty!

[(Anonymous)]

That surprised me too. Regardless of whether or not you consider the series to be good, it was a best selling series. Why didn't she get credit for the co-authorship?

[blitzwing]

(especially Polgara who wanted to be a housewife and make her own soap wtf)

What's weird about wanting to make your own soap?

[killaurey]

I actually thought that Polgara's wanting to be a housewife made sense for her? She spent SO, SO long helping other people raise families and never got to have one of her own, so finally, when she got to, she was so happy. It's not a dream I would have for myself, but I honestly liked that Polgara was so happy with what she'd dreamed of, making soap and doing dishes and gardening and all.

[nightscale]

I remember liking the women in this series but I was a teenager the last time I read it so who knows how I'd feel about them now and if I'd pick up on anything odd(sometimes I want to re-read it, but there are so many books in this series, gah).

[shahrizai]

I avoid a lot of the long older series because of this. I ain't got time to read everything in the world, and so many of the classics copy many of the same themes over and over and over again so I try to pick series that break the mould.

[(Anonymous)]

You should definitely avoid Eddings, then. He deliberately deals in fantasy cliches, and the Mallorean (the series that follows the Belgariad) is pretty much the same plot as the Belgariad. He gets away with it by claiming that well, it's supposed to be repetitive because the Prophecy has doomed the quest to repeat itself, but... yeah, that sounds like BS to me. He was notorious for recycling the same material over and over again.

[(Anonymous)]

Stop reading older series if their characterizations and values bother you so much. The series' were written in the 1980s. That the female characetrs had their own personalities and got to do stuff instead of being delicate damsels in distress was pretty damn great at the time.

That's probably my biggest problem with Tumblr's SJWs, to be honest. You lot are utterly incapable of seeing things through another perspective, whether it's time period, country, culture or something else. You see everyting fromt he point of view of a 2016 teenaged American.

[(Anonymous)]

You know, you can realize that something was a product of its time and still take satisfaction from sporking it. Not everything is a vast SJW tumblrina conspiracy that needs to be chased off your lawn.

[(Anonymous)]

Oh lawdy, the 1980s! Dark times when all women existed to do was make babies and swoon.

Sword and Sorceress was being published in the 1980s. Anne McCaffrey's female-led Pern books were in the 1970s. The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe was in the 50s. The Wizard of Oz was published in 1900. All of those had women with their own personalities and who got to do stuff. Maybe they weren't perfect, but that's a pretty darn low bar!

You anti-SJW refuse to look at any sort of history and just shrug and make excuses for bad behavior. He couldn't help being sexist! It was just The Dark Ages, the 1980s. No one had ever written wimmenz before! How was he supposed to know they were people?

[(Anonymous)]

Was I the only one who also got a weird sort of mommy-wife vibe from his female characters too? Like they all had a weird mix of condescending and nurturing towards their love interest and other guys. Mommy knows best, now wipe your nose and let me brush your hair and you can go out and save the world! I'll sit here quietly supporting you, even if I am totally powerful enough to do it on my own, because men are delicate baby boys who must be humored. That's why they rule the world and do everything important.

Like it was attempting to be pro-lady by showing how awesome they were at helping the hero, but it ended up just being that comic about how a badass female character in a movie only exists to train The Chosen One in a quick montage so he can go fight the real bad guy and she can get saved or at most have the B fight.

[(Anonymous)]

I do enjoy this series and re-read it a couple of years ago, but agree there are a lot of cookie cutter characters, not just limited to the female ones (although it is more noticeable on them as they're fewer in number to start with).