[ 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)]

Eddings always puzzled me because it didn't seem like he didn't like women or thought women were inferior, it seemed like he thought women were a different species, and men and women were destined to always have wacky hilarious battle-of-the-sexes domestic conflicts. It puzzled me even more when his wife was added to the books as a co-author. It could be her name's tacked on there so she'll retain the copyright after he dies, which is a classy thing to do. But if not, there's a woman involved in writing those books who apparently does not find it unreasonable to portray men and women as being so utterly alien.

[(Anonymous)]

From what I'm given to understand, Eddings' wife was always very involved in writing the books, to the point where she really should have had a co-writing credit on all of them. Something similar is the case in WoT, Jordan's wife was very heavily involved in editing the books (I believe she was pretty much the only editor for several of the books in the middle of the series). Just one of those things.

[(Anonymous)]

Hmm, interesting. So at least one woman was good with his, uh, version.

I get so profoundly weirded out by some peoples' approaches to gender relations.

[(Anonymous)]

And (anecdotal evidence alert) I've known well many more female fans of both series than I have male fans of either.

Just one of those things, anon, just one of those things.

[ariakas]

Probably because, in spite of their take on gender relations, they were some of the only fantasy series at the time to include large sections dedicated to female characters, and female characters with agency, at that.

Men could go read shit that left women out altogether, or just foisted them off as love interests. Like Feist - his fans are overwhelmingly male and, especially in his early books, women were all wives or kidnapped girlfriends.

We've got better now though.

[(Anonymous)]

This was definitely after Song of Ice and Fire was around, though, which is something that I think you've used as an example of something that does it better (correct me if I'm wrong).

[ariakas]

Eh what? The first book of ASoIaF wasn't out until 1996, and the series didn't really start to get popular until the 2000s.

Eddings published the first book of the Belgariad in 1982, and finished the Malloreon (ten books later) in 1991. By 1996 he'd already started publishing the spinoff with his wife.

Jordan published The Wheel of Time in 1990. By 1996 he'd released the seventh volume.

Feist started the Riftwar Saga in 1982. By 1996 he was already twelve books into the series.

So... no? No it totally wasn't. In the 80s/early 90s there was a dearth of fantasy with good female characters.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, but I am not so venerable and wise as your honored self, and hence my experience, being a callow and immature youth, is from my teenage years in the middle of the 2000s. When I knew several girls who enjoyed Eddings and Robert Jordan.

More generally, I just don't why it should be impossible for women to enjoy those series for what they are.

[ariakas]

I.... never said they couldn't enjoy them for what they are, overly defensive anon. It's great that "several girls" you know enjoyed those series - I loved the shit out of Eddings' Elenium myself as a girl. He spins a good yarn.

I was just explaining the phenomenon of them having larger female than male audiences in the 80s/90s. Male fantasy readers had shit like Feist, whereas if women wanted fantasy that catered to them at all, this was the best they could get.

[ariakas]

Lol he also thinks men and women have different elbows. I still remember one of his characters telling a fully robed and cloaked person was a woman when she raised her arms because of her elbows.

Dude can't into physiology? I get that that's a common myth - like the people who think women have more ribs, or fewer teeth - but it could be dispelled with even the slightest amount of research. And it wasn't like he was trying to portray the character as believing a myth, either - the character was correct, and was portrayed as being very clever and observant.

I don't even know, dude. But then again Aristotle himself couldn't be assed to look into a woman's mouth and just blindly believed the teeth thing, too. And I mean, those are demonstrable untruths. For the Mars/Venus sociological stuff, there's all kinds of dumb horseshit people believe are just factual differences between the sexes.

[(Anonymous)]

Well...There *are* some ways to tell men and women apart like that because men and women actually do usually move differently [for example, compare how most women walk to how most men walk], but the elbow thing always did confuse me. : /

[ariakas]

Oh for sure there are - though I think the character was standing still at the time - but there's height, overall body shape, sloping shoulders, head size... ...of all of those things that would be totally valid, why did he pick one that's completely untrue?

[(Anonymous)]

Uh maybe because if you had even the slightest bit of biological/physical knowledge of the human body, you would know that women's elbows are hinged differently from men's.

[ariakas]

Women's elbows aren't synovial hinges? News to me, Dr. Internet! Our ball joined elbows must be totally rad! Or are men's elbow joints not synovial hinges?

EDIT so that you don't waste your time if you mean what I think you mean: The carrying angle (which wouldn't have been observed in the posture Eddings was describing; it's measured with the arms extended downwards, palm up) right? The slight difference in bone alignment that has nothing to do with the way the joint is "hinged"? The variation that has "extensive overlap in the carrying angle between individual men and women, and a sex-bias has not been consistently observed in scientific studies"?

That, uh, what he was supposed to be using to know for certain it was a woman in a posture that would have made observing it impossible, using a trait that occurs similarly in both sexes.

Come on dude.

[(Anonymous)]

I don't know if the man himself thinks that or that he's having his characters think like that to deliberately spoof what he calls 'fantasy that doesn't acknowledge that women exist below the neck'. I haven't read anything of his in a long time but I always figured 1) the thought of a fantasy world with more balanced gender roles hadn't occurred to him and 2) he was a fucking prankster. Either way, beats Goodkind by miles. That guy are sick.