[ SECRET POST #2216 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2216 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 120 secrets from Secret Submission Post #317.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 - personal attack ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I still think Wheel of Time doesn't belong in that list. I know no one here agrees with me, though.

Although, saying that, even if you do think it's bad, it's still not as bad as Terry Goodkind. Nothing is.

[(Anonymous)]

All three of them are bad in different ways. I would say that many individual female characters in Wheel of Time are pretty good characters by themselves, but when you look at the work as a whole the characterization trends are not so good. Eddings... honestly, I think all the characters have about the same half-inch depth (maybe an inch for Belgarath and Polgara) and the gender duality presented is bizarre and not at all compatible with my own view of the world, but not the worst I've seen. Goodkind... well. What can you say about Goodkind. I'd classify Eddings as clueless, Jordan as off, and Goodkind as off and malicious.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not going to defend Jordan here (if you really want to see what I think, read pretty much any anon comment defending Jordan in the thread yesterday). But I do think that, whatever you want to say about Eddings and Jordan, Goodkind is just so much, so much worse than either of them. I mean, it's not just that he's malicious, he's just much worse about everything than either of them. It's like he's on a different scale.

I guess what I'm trying to get across here is that Goodkind is astoundingly bad, at everything.

[(Anonymous)]

I... actually have no place talking about Goodkind because I read half the first book fifteen years ago and remember practically nothing about it, but from everything I have heard you are correct.

[(Anonymous)]

I agree with your assessment of the writers. Eddings strikes me as the kind of antiquated misogynist, like someone's sexist grandpa who only likes pretty women, but only if they don't think too much. Jordan has a funky hang-up about men vs. women and how men are helpless thralls to anyone with a vagina. Goodkind is... pathological.

[something_greater]

I agree with you! I'm in the middle of The Dragon Reborn right now on my roughly 8th re-read of the first 6 books in the series (working my way to AMoL! I am so excited!) and I have to say that 1. anyone who disses Jordan's handling of female characters had better be taking a LOT of YA and fantasy written by women to task with just as much vigor and 2. it's nowhere near as bad as I remember thinking it was when I was a teenager.

Strangely enough, no longer being 14 has done wonders for my appreciation for how nuanced his grasp of female characters are, especially the adults. They're characters with motivations and politics and allegiances of their own first, and women second. Not because they aren't women, but because what they do is more important than what gender they are. Which is kind of what equality is about, theoretically?

[nynaeve_sedai]

My largest critique was the way they fell in love. No matter the female character the way he described me made me think they were all in high school getting their first crush. Siuan for example - this very shrewd woman gets...giddy?

Overall though he had varied female leads that were incredibly strong. I didn't like all of them (please, someone, punch Elayne. Repeatedly) - but they were hardly carbon copies or boring stereotypes.

[something_greater]

I've always explained Robert Jordan as a writer as an incredibly skilled fantasy writer with great strengths in military tactics, politics, prophecy, and world building who also just happens to have the soul of a 14 year old girl when it comes to romance.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that he was ridiculously, over-the-top in love with his wife (who was nine years his senior and a Harvard-Radcliffe graduate!) who he met when he was 29 after having spent the last 9 years of his life in an extremely regimented military environment. Given that most of his male characters react to romance in a deeply high school way (Rand, Mat, and Perrin's recurring conviction that the other two are the ones who are Good With Girls, anyone?) I just suspect that in his experience that's how romance worked.

Which is why I cut him some slack, because I find it kind of endearing? Also while double-checking the dates on the series I was struck again by just how impressive James Rigney (Robert Jordan's real name) was. He was a Vietnam vet who went to The Citadel after his tours, got a degree in physics, and was working as a nuclear engineer for the Navy when he met his future wife. Who was also a badass, and a professional editor. It just seems really awesome to me that they wrote books together for 30 years, and that she was instrumental in making sure that the last books of the series got published after he died.

[nynaeve_sedai]

That's pretty much the exact same explanation my husband gave me LOL. I don't fault him - it's my only major complaint. There maybe a good reason behind it, but it does drive me a bit batty :)

[(Anonymous)]

Jordan gets a lot of criticism because he was one of the biggest fantasy writers and his series is one of the most well-known, long-running series out there. ANYONE who writes a series that big and that popular with such terrible handling of female characters (or one could argue, characters, period) is going to get a lot of flack, regardless of gender. As they should.

I didn't find his grasp of female characters nuanced at all. They're nearly interchangeable in terms of personality, and there's a sharp and very glaring divide between men vs. women in his books, especially in how they relate to the opposite gender. All the women being argumentative manipulators of men does not strike me as being anywhere near equality.

[(Anonymous)]

I wish someone had taken the copy of Ayn Rand's biography away from Goodkind about four books ago. He was almost readable until he went on that Tea-Party manifesto kick.