[ SECRET POST #2550 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2550 ⌋

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

01.


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02.
[Rachel Getting Married]


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04.


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05.
[american horror story: coven]


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07.


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08.
[Mass Effect]


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09.
[Rules of Engagement]


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10.

















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 01 pages, 010 secrets from Secret Submission Post #363.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[intrigueing]

I thought the book was one of the most mind-bogglingly pretentious things I have ever clapped my eyeballs on in my entire life, but now that I think about it, a movie adaptation seems to suit it, because the actual story was good. How good was the movie?

[(Anonymous)]

Never read the book but the movie was extremely pretentious and we turned it off halfway through. I normally don't mind overly sentimental coming of age stories, but for some reason this one came off too heavy handed for my tastes.

[logicbutton]

Haven't seen the movie, but I read his other book, Everything is Illuminated, and it was one of the most pretentious things I'd ever read in my entire life, with shallow, awful characters and a really strange attitude toward women.

[(Anonymous)]

Can you define "really strange"? I'm curious to know.

[logicbutton]

It's been a long time since I read the book, but I'll try.

For one thing, there are only a few female characters of any significance, and with one exception, they're pretty archetypal - crone-type, MPDG-type. The exception is a very important character whose inner life we do see, but she's seriously oversexualized (in fact, all the female characters aside from the crone-archetype are highly sexualized), not in the sense that she is comfortable with her sexuality, but in the sense that the narrative and other characters find her super sexy. Apparently, literally every citizen of the village she lives in - man, woman, young, old - has proposed marriage to her at least once by her twelfth birthday. She's raped around then (the narrative implies that she's raped multiple times, but I think we only see the one), for no other apparent reason than to make the story more dramatic. Also around that time, her father dies, and since he's her only family, she marries soon afterward. I think this is because the reason she gave when refusing proposals was that her father thought she was too young, even though her actual reason was that she wasn't interested. Anyway, when she's still a teenager, her husband suffers a head injury that makes him so violent and abusive that eventually they can't even be in the same room, which turns the conflict in their relationship from "how can we have sex without you beating the shit out of me" to "how can we have sex through this wall".

Without exception, all the important female characters are portrayed as mysteries for the male characters to solve.

Finally, the main character is a Ukrainian guy who learns most of his English vocabulary from a thesaurus and uses a lot of words that are technically correct but sound strange to native speakers. For example, he refers to all female dogs as "bitches". His grandfather has a seeing-eye dog who is present in most of the scenes the main character is in, so there are literally hundreds of instances of the word "bitch" in the book. I thought it was kind of amusing the very first time, but after the next hundred times or so I started to get the impression that the author just liked having an excuse to use the word.

So that's what I meant when I said the attitude toward women was really strange. It was sort of like the author's entire breadth of exposure to women had been via classical mythology and porn.

[(Anonymous)]

This is said. I remember liking the film version of everything is illuminated but I don't recall the multiple rapes. Perhaps they left it out?

[inkdust]

I've only read half of Extremely Loud, but I already like it SO much more than Everything is Illuminated. Much more...emotionally appealing? Less snobbishly absurd. But different tastes, of course.