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Apr. 23rd, 2010 03:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bliumchik posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
anti_recsA few months ago, some of my friends conspired to lend me Anne Bishop's Blood Jewels trilogy.
Because they had genuinely enjoyed the books as teenagers (and I suspect, not reread them since) and thought it would be my sort of thing. Which I suppose, if it wasn't for all the... everything, it totally would be.
I started to read the first book on the bus home from the party at which I obtained them. I barely got two pages in before I began to feel the need to for eyebrow-raising so extreme I feared I would develop hairy antennae. My friends were therefore subjected to the following text messages in quick succession:
-"A witch's life hangs by the hymenal thread"!? WHAT HAVE YOU PEOPLE GIVEN ME?
-lol! Zuultah! The queen of Pruul! This is ridic!
-"the rats... my balls are gone!" "cruel ring of gold around his organ" THIS IS HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE
-THIS IS SO BAD. WHY AM I READING BADFIC. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?
-lolol extraordinary sapphire eyes I THINK I READ THIS FIC ONCE ONLY IT WAS ABOUT DRACO MALFOY AND RAVEN DEMENTIA WAY
-THIS NOVEL OFFENDS MY VERY BEING.
Let me explain. The capslock was fully justified. This series, while serviceably written and containing themes that a budding little perv might well have been grateful for in the days before internet fanfiction, is based on concepts that... honestly, for the life of me I can't figure out whether this is offensive or hilarious.
Let us begin with the hymenal thread. These books are set in a world ruled by magic users, whose power is determined by the colour of the Jewels they are both born with and later, given in a magical ceremony. (I could not ascertain whether kids were literally born with rocks and, if so, whether magical epidurals are better than regular ones.) This society is nominally matriarchal, although this is severely undermined by the apparent rules of the universe.
For one thing, a woman's magical power and, indeed, her very sanity is entirely dependant on the manner in which she loses her virginity.
Yes folks, you read that right - raping a potential magic user who happens to be in posession of a hymen breaks her power totally, and possibly makes her go crazy. This is a ~plot point~. This is multiple plot points.
It doesn't end there, though. The corrupt matriarchal oligarchy/aristocracy keeps men as sex slaves, controlled by magical golden cockrings.
God, I can't believe I just typed that.
The thing is - what we have here is an essential gender-power reversal that doesn't work. Women are in charge because their ~power tends to be stronger, but all three of the men whose point of view we actually get and are meant to sympathise with are incredibly powerful, and one in particular spends rather a lot of time sulking and thinking about how he's more powerful than any of these women and if it weren't for that blasted magical golden cockring and some emotional blackmail involving his brother he would be happy to kill them all.
Oh, did I mention two of those men are called Saetan and Daemon? Saetan is the lord of Hell, which is not actually ~HELL~ just the plane of existence where dead people (or possibly just dead magic users?) go.
Anyway, my point: our point of view characters are inhabiting an oppressed space which we recognise as being coded female, but they still feel like the cocky, entirely undowntrodden dudes you might expect to be doing the oppressing. I don't know, it just rang false to me.
...oh yeah, and the whole point of the first book is to set up the main character of the series, a Prophecied One True Witch Queen who is currently a seven-year-old with more power than ANYBODY, EVER EVER, HAS EVER HAD, and also a horrifically abusive family, and whom the hundred-or-so-year-old Daemon falls in love with on sight. But don't worry! He reassures himself (and us) that his love is of the soul, not the body, so it won't be too hard on him not to touch her till she's seventeen.
So that's all right then.
Because they had genuinely enjoyed the books as teenagers (and I suspect, not reread them since) and thought it would be my sort of thing. Which I suppose, if it wasn't for all the... everything, it totally would be.
I started to read the first book on the bus home from the party at which I obtained them. I barely got two pages in before I began to feel the need to for eyebrow-raising so extreme I feared I would develop hairy antennae. My friends were therefore subjected to the following text messages in quick succession:
-"A witch's life hangs by the hymenal thread"!? WHAT HAVE YOU PEOPLE GIVEN ME?
-lol! Zuultah! The queen of Pruul! This is ridic!
-"the rats... my balls are gone!" "cruel ring of gold around his organ" THIS IS HIGHLY QUESTIONABLE
-THIS IS SO BAD. WHY AM I READING BADFIC. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE!?
-lolol extraordinary sapphire eyes I THINK I READ THIS FIC ONCE ONLY IT WAS ABOUT DRACO MALFOY AND RAVEN DEMENTIA WAY
-THIS NOVEL OFFENDS MY VERY BEING.
Let me explain. The capslock was fully justified. This series, while serviceably written and containing themes that a budding little perv might well have been grateful for in the days before internet fanfiction, is based on concepts that... honestly, for the life of me I can't figure out whether this is offensive or hilarious.
Let us begin with the hymenal thread. These books are set in a world ruled by magic users, whose power is determined by the colour of the Jewels they are both born with and later, given in a magical ceremony. (I could not ascertain whether kids were literally born with rocks and, if so, whether magical epidurals are better than regular ones.) This society is nominally matriarchal, although this is severely undermined by the apparent rules of the universe.
For one thing, a woman's magical power and, indeed, her very sanity is entirely dependant on the manner in which she loses her virginity.
Yes folks, you read that right - raping a potential magic user who happens to be in posession of a hymen breaks her power totally, and possibly makes her go crazy. This is a ~plot point~. This is multiple plot points.
It doesn't end there, though. The corrupt matriarchal oligarchy/aristocracy keeps men as sex slaves, controlled by magical golden cockrings.
God, I can't believe I just typed that.
The thing is - what we have here is an essential gender-power reversal that doesn't work. Women are in charge because their ~power tends to be stronger, but all three of the men whose point of view we actually get and are meant to sympathise with are incredibly powerful, and one in particular spends rather a lot of time sulking and thinking about how he's more powerful than any of these women and if it weren't for that blasted magical golden cockring and some emotional blackmail involving his brother he would be happy to kill them all.
Oh, did I mention two of those men are called Saetan and Daemon? Saetan is the lord of Hell, which is not actually ~HELL~ just the plane of existence where dead people (or possibly just dead magic users?) go.
Anyway, my point: our point of view characters are inhabiting an oppressed space which we recognise as being coded female, but they still feel like the cocky, entirely undowntrodden dudes you might expect to be doing the oppressing. I don't know, it just rang false to me.
...oh yeah, and the whole point of the first book is to set up the main character of the series, a Prophecied One True Witch Queen who is currently a seven-year-old with more power than ANYBODY, EVER EVER, HAS EVER HAD, and also a horrifically abusive family, and whom the hundred-or-so-year-old Daemon falls in love with on sight. But don't worry! He reassures himself (and us) that his love is of the soul, not the body, so it won't be too hard on him not to touch her till she's seventeen.
So that's all right then.