[ SECRET POST #3550 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3550 ⌋

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

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[Star Trek]


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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages,08 secrets from Secret Submission Post #507.
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

[ketita]

This was why I quit after book 1, basically. That and all the sex/rape/death.
And I have to agree on the originality thing - people act like there's never been anything like this, like nobody's ever subverted anything in the fantasy world until this came along, which is blatantly untrue.
It's fine if people enjoy it, but stop preaching about it, yeesh.

[(Anonymous)]

Same. Whenever I mention I don't like all the rape and sexual assault in the books, book, (and sometimes tv) fans always go nuts and get on my ass because excessive rape is apparently ""realistic.""
Ignoring the fact that dragons, ice zombies, and decade long seasons exist in the same universe lmao.

[ketita]

Ughhhh that fucking excuse grinds my gears so bad.
Like you said, nothing there is fucking "realistic", so why the rape obsession? (I mean, I know why, it's just gross).
You know what else is realistic? Farting. Diarrhea. Weird stains in underwear. Furuncles. Poor mouth hygiene. Yet somehow we never get tons of loving descriptions of these! Astonishing.

[(Anonymous)]

"You know what else is realistic? Farting. Diarrhea. Weird stains in underwear..."

Exactly.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah exactly! And whenever I bring up the fact that if rape was really so "realistic" in this universe, then why don't men get raped just as much as the other female characters, I'm always met with crickets. Gee, I wonder why.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree. I was turned off the series because of the incessant rape of female characters. It actually disturbs me that this book series and tv series is lauded in society when it is rape-obsessed.
People said the same thing about the tv series OZ, to which I reply 'Yes it had rape in it a fair amount, but there was a consequence to the rape. The rape was treated as the horrible thing that it is and characters would go seasons still dealing with what happened to them!'
As far as I've seen of GoT, rape is so much a 'of the (fantasy) times' that it is just treated as something women have to put up with.
Also, I honestly don't think it's well written. Rather than having dozens of characters, a good author will combine to have say half a dozen really well written, complex characters IMO

[(Anonymous)]

Things that actually exist in that series: loving descriptions of diarrhea.

Male rape, though, that's beyond the pale.

[(Anonymous)]

Lol agreed - I got my master's in medieval history, and the "realistic" claim is just so frustrating. It's not any more inherently realistic than the good, selfless hero conquering darkness, it's skewed to the other side. Believe it or not, not all medieval women were raped, not everyone was tortured to death. Sometimes, life was actually okay, just like it was sometimes shitty.

[ketita]

The crazy thing is when you say this to people they get this blank "no way" look. People don't know history for shit.

Is there some research paper titled NO PEOPLE WERE NOT GETTING RAPED ALL DAY IN MEDIEVAL TIMES that I can print and thrust into people's faces whenever this comes up?

[sarillia]

This is the point I've been trying to make with a friend of mine. Generalizations that are skewed toward cynicism are treated as more mature and nuanced than generalizations skewed toward idealism even if there's an equal amount of thought and complexity involved, and it frustrates me.

[(Anonymous)]

Let's not forget all the lovely clean-shaven ladies. So realistic!

[(Anonymous)]

Not in Europe perhaps but in the Middle East they did pluck or scrape off all women's body hair.

[(Anonymous)]

In ancient Egypt, not just the women's. But big parts of ASoIaF are Europe inspired, so it doesn't really fit.

[philstar22]

This so much. Fantasy has been subverted since the beginning of its existence. Fantasy has had "dark" and "realistic" stuff since it began. I'm happy people like them, but it pisses me off when people act like they are the only ones to ever do these things or that having lots of sex somehow makes them better than other things that don't have lots of sex.

[ketita]

Yes! People are like "it's DARK, unlike that sparklepoo Tolkien" and I froth and go HAVE YOU EVEN FUCKING READ TOLKIEN. Yes, it's not the current fashion of grim-n-gritty, but Tolkien was pretty dark.

And even when people go "yes, but it set up a Good Main Character and killed him of brutally in the first book, so surprising!" I'm like fuckers, I can list fantasy books that did that way before.

[philstar22]

Yup. Definitely a rage button for me. Even the Hobbit has dark parts, and that was written for children. LOTR has lots of darkness, and the Silmarillion even more so. The only thing not there is the sex and the rape (unless you go by fanfic), but there is war and torture and horrific deaths and awful and complex people. Like, stop saying Tolkien isn't dark. Clearly you haven't actually read anything he ever wrote.

And yes, the good main character dying has happened before in fantasy.

[sarillia]

I don't get what version of Lord of the Rings those kinds of ASOIAF fans have read either.

[ketita]

I'd assume that all they remember from the books is "pretty elves singing songs", which... it did happen, but apparently they missed the rest of the plot.

Though to be honest, if I have two series of which I will only remember very vague details, and one of them is "pretty elves singing songs" and the other is "rape and death", I'd stick with the elves personally.

[(Anonymous)]

>I'm like fuckers, I can list fantasy books that did that way before.

Okay, so name them.

[ketita]

meh, of course somebody was going to ask for that here. I'm having serious trouble listing fantasy books today, in part because I'm half a world away from all my bookshelves and it's kind of tough to rattle it off.
I remember though that Mickey Zucker Reichert's The Last of the Renshai subverted the "chosen hero" trope in a very surprising way - it surprised me way more than AGOT did, when Ned Stark was killed. (those books have other issues... but I quite liked them).
Thing is, I don't generally like it when a hero I like is killed off, so I quit a lot of those books when that happened. I'm trying to remember the names, but blanking atm :(

[(Anonymous)]

.2 seconds to google. Warn8ng, obviously spoilers in the links.

Whats a good book where lots of the main characters get killed off? Particularly ones you care about?
https://m.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/2hjk4i/whats_a_good_book_where_lots_of_the_main/

Popular main character dies books
https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/main-character-dies

What are some really good books where the protagonist dies?
https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-really-good-books-where-the-protagonist-dies

There are more, but I was trying not to spoil myself.

[arcadiaego]

I'm rereading LotR at the moment and the Mordor sections are so unremittingly grim. And given lots of it is clearly based on World War One, just as 'realistic' as ASoiaF

[ketita]

Yeah. I think tbh it has more to do with today's mentality of "everybody is actually a shitty human being" than anything else. So you get characters in Tolkien who actually strive to do the right thing shock horror, so people think of it as "unrealistic". It's stupid.

[(Anonymous)]

Tolkein was dark, but fairly bloodless. LotR's violent segments read more like a history text - it was an account of bad things that happened, but wasn't a visceral description. There was more emotional weight to the description of the psychological toll of the events, but that's the sort of thing that's very hit-and-miss, and will come off just as dry and bloodless to some readers, so even if on an objective level LotR was just as dark as AsoIaF, on a subjective level, it doesn't feel nearly so to a lot of readers.

And a lot of people probably just saw the movies, which were a lot shinier.

[ketita]

You're right. A lot of it comes down to style rather than content.
Somebody should write a "gritty version" of LOTR, just to demonstrate what it would look like in contemporary grimdark style XD

I guess I just fundamentally reject the binary people try to have, with LOTR on one side and ASOIAF on the other, because that's not true to the genre at all.