Marie Brennan's Blog, page 243
November 22, 2010
for my science friends
I'm not sure how to phrase this best, but -- at what point in history did we start to develop actual, workable "detection" devices? I'm thinking of things along the lines of a Geiger counter, but it doesn't have to be a radiation detector; just a device to measure anything not visible to the eye. Wikipedia claims Gauss invented an early magnetometer in 1833, but the claim consists of three not terribly informative sentences, and the article on Gauss himself just says he developed a "method" for measuring magnetism, without specifying what it was.
Basically, Fate may or may not end up including a device for the measuring of a particular substance/effect/force/whatever, and I'm trying to figure out how much the concept of such a thing existed by 1884. (The question of how this thing works can be dealt with separately, if I decide to include it.)
Any historians of science able to answer that one for me?
Basically, Fate may or may not end up including a device for the measuring of a particular substance/effect/force/whatever, and I'm trying to figure out how much the concept of such a thing existed by 1884. (The question of how this thing works can be dealt with separately, if I decide to include it.)
Any historians of science able to answer that one for me?
more than official
With the two new scenes I added in tonight, With Fate Conspire passed the 150,000 word mark. (150,975 words, to be precise.)
Nothing next to the bricks of epic fantasy, of course -- but more than long enough for me. Unfortunately for that sentiment, I have four more scenes to add before this revision is done. Please, God, don't let this book balloon all the way up to 160K . . . .
Nothing next to the bricks of epic fantasy, of course -- but more than long enough for me. Unfortunately for that sentiment, I have four more scenes to add before this revision is done. Please, God, don't let this book balloon all the way up to 160K . . . .
Writing Fight Scenes: The Question of Purpose
[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]
All right, enough vague philosophizing. Let's start digging into the practicalities.
For my money, the most important question you should ask yourself in writing a fight scenes is, What is the purpose of this fight?
"Who is involved in this fight?" is also a critically important question, and we'll get to that soon enough. But the who is a matter for inside the story, whereas the purpose is a matter for both within and without.
Inside the story, we're asking why these characters are fighting. What's their impetus for doing so, and what do they hope to accomplish? Outside, we're asking what the fight is supposed to do for the story as a whole. As we discussed last time, there should ideally be more than one answer to that latter question.
In The Princess Bride, there's a lengthy swordfight between Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black (whose identity is, at that point in the narrative, unknown) atop the Cliffs of Insanity. If you need a refresher on this scene, go grab your DVD; we'll wait until you get back.
Done? Okay. So, in-character purpose first.
Inigo's primary goal is to stop the Man in Black from pursuing Vizzini et al. The likely method of accomplishing this is to kill his opponent ("You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.") Pretty straightforward. But there's a secondary purpose -- clearer in the book, but still visible in the movie -- which is that Inigo wants a challenge. He is, so far as he knows, the best swordsman in the world; it's been so long since he met a worthy opponent that he's gotten in the habit of dueling left-handed, just to make things more interesting for himself. So Inigo wants to win . . . but not too easily.
The Man in Black's purpose is largely unclear at that moment in the story, beyond the fact that he's obviously pursuing Vizzini, and therefore wants to get past Inigo. With the benefit of hindsight, we know he's trying to retrieve Buttercup from her kidnappers, because he's still in love with her and wants to find out whether she still loves him. He doesn't seem particularly motivated to kill Inigo, though: his response to the line quoted above is "You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die." When he gets the chance to strike, he claims "I would as soon destroy a stained-glass window as an artist like yourself," and clubs Inigo into unconsciousness. The only person he seems to want to kill is Vizzini, and that might just be an artifact of the format they choose for their confrontation.
Interestingly, he also decides to fight left-handed, against his natural inclination. Why? Not for the same reason as Inigo. Not for any visible reason at all, really -- until we look to the external purpose of the scene.
William Goldman, who wrote both the book and the film based on it, clearly wants to throw some obstacles into his hero's path. A whole series of them, in fact, which aren't just there to fill time; they also neatly demonstrate the various talents Westley has picked up in his years as the Dread Pirate Roberts' valet and eventual successor. So, this scene is here to show us he's a brilliant swordsman. (A skill which, oddly enough, he doesn't really use for the remainder of the story, although there are moments where the threat of using it is important.)
For us to understand that Westley is a brilliant swordsman, we need his opponent to also be impressive. The chatter between the two early on establishes that they both know their shit on an intellectual level, and the work they do while chatting demonstrates its practical application. But we the audience also know Inigo's fighting with a handicap (and still expects to win), so the fact that his survival depends on him switching to his dominant hand? Tells us this guy in black is pretty damn good. And then they get up to that wall, and Inigo's winning . . . .
Where we discover the Man in Black was also fighting with his off hand.
It has less to do with his own purpose, and more to do with the writer's purpose in crafting the scene. Aside from being a dramatic reveal, a charming bit of parallelism, and a moment to subdivide the very long fight (that's something we'll talk about more later), it hammers home the fact that Westley is just that badass. Inigo, who's been set up as the consummate swordsman, has finally met his match.
(We should pause here to note that in many cases, it's a bad idea to have the only (apparent) reason for something be external to the story. "Because the author needed him to" is not a satisfactory answer to the question of "why did the hero do that?" It works here because the story already has its tongue planted pretty firmly in its cheek, and also because it isn't inconsistent with Westley's character.)
That's how I analyze the fight, anyway. I don't actually know what was in Goldman's head. So let me talk briefly about one of my own scenes. I don't claim it's brilliant stuff -- hell, I was nineteen when I wrote it -- but at least I know why it goes the way it does.
In Warrior (formerly known as Doppelganger), there's a scene where Mirage, one of the protagonists, gets jumped by a group of four Thornbloods. Externally, the reason for it is mostly plot: Mirage needs to get captured, so she can have a Very Important Encounter not long after. But I also wanted a chance to demonstrate something important to the story, which is that Mirage, for reasons of her nature, is gifted at combat beyond the norm. There are a few fights earlier in the story, but they're largely brief and against people who don't pose much of a challenge; the semi-exception, a scuffle with the assassin she's chasing, isn't a big set-piece either. (That comes later in the story.) So by putting Mirage against four highly trained opponents, I got a chance to really flex her muscles, so to speak.
Internally, there are of course two sides, Mirage and her opponents. Her goal, as I conceived of it, is primarily to get away. Four-to-one may be normal movie odds, but it's pretty bad in real life, and so her best bet is to escape. In pursuit of that, she is willing to kill, maim, or otherwise incapacitate them in any way she can, while trying to get to a door. The Thornbloods, by contrast, have been told to bring her in alive. This handicaps them in multiple ways: they show up with staves and bare hands, rather than the blades they'd rather be using; they can't risk injury that might kill her; and they can't let her escape. Furthermore, there's a character detail in that the group is being led by a woman who really detests Mirage. She's masked, so Mirage doesn't know it's her until the fight is over, but it does color the way I conceived of and wrote the scene.
Why does the question of purpose matter? On the internal level, it determines what the characters are willing and unwilling to do. You probably won't kill your best friend if the goal is just to make her give back the diary she stole from your dresser; on the other hand, if the guy you're fighting murdered your entire family and you want him to pay? Very few holds barred, there. On the external level, it determines how you put the fight on the page, and how it will end. Mirage's need to escape and not get surrounded meant the fight would be very kinetic, moving all over the room; the handicap on the Thornbloods meant she wouldn't be permanently hurt; the plot reason behind the whole thing meant it would end with her being captured; and the desire to show off Mirage's skills meant the whole thing got a fair bit of page time (about four pages all told).
Know why you're doing this fight. Know why your characters are doing it, too. Having to articulate those answers to yourself may give you interesting ideas for how it should go, or make you rethink why you're bothering in the first place. "Because it would be cool" is not inherently a bad answer -- that's at least partially the answer behind every fight scene I write -- but it probably shouldn't be the only one, unless you know you're writing for the sort of audience that will eat it up.
Feel free to discuss other examples (your own work included) in comments. The tension between the different purposes can be really fun to explore.
All right, enough vague philosophizing. Let's start digging into the practicalities.
For my money, the most important question you should ask yourself in writing a fight scenes is, What is the purpose of this fight?
"Who is involved in this fight?" is also a critically important question, and we'll get to that soon enough. But the who is a matter for inside the story, whereas the purpose is a matter for both within and without.
Inside the story, we're asking why these characters are fighting. What's their impetus for doing so, and what do they hope to accomplish? Outside, we're asking what the fight is supposed to do for the story as a whole. As we discussed last time, there should ideally be more than one answer to that latter question.
In The Princess Bride, there's a lengthy swordfight between Inigo Montoya and the Man in Black (whose identity is, at that point in the narrative, unknown) atop the Cliffs of Insanity. If you need a refresher on this scene, go grab your DVD; we'll wait until you get back.
Done? Okay. So, in-character purpose first.
Inigo's primary goal is to stop the Man in Black from pursuing Vizzini et al. The likely method of accomplishing this is to kill his opponent ("You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.") Pretty straightforward. But there's a secondary purpose -- clearer in the book, but still visible in the movie -- which is that Inigo wants a challenge. He is, so far as he knows, the best swordsman in the world; it's been so long since he met a worthy opponent that he's gotten in the habit of dueling left-handed, just to make things more interesting for himself. So Inigo wants to win . . . but not too easily.
The Man in Black's purpose is largely unclear at that moment in the story, beyond the fact that he's obviously pursuing Vizzini, and therefore wants to get past Inigo. With the benefit of hindsight, we know he's trying to retrieve Buttercup from her kidnappers, because he's still in love with her and wants to find out whether she still loves him. He doesn't seem particularly motivated to kill Inigo, though: his response to the line quoted above is "You seem a decent fellow. I hate to die." When he gets the chance to strike, he claims "I would as soon destroy a stained-glass window as an artist like yourself," and clubs Inigo into unconsciousness. The only person he seems to want to kill is Vizzini, and that might just be an artifact of the format they choose for their confrontation.
Interestingly, he also decides to fight left-handed, against his natural inclination. Why? Not for the same reason as Inigo. Not for any visible reason at all, really -- until we look to the external purpose of the scene.
William Goldman, who wrote both the book and the film based on it, clearly wants to throw some obstacles into his hero's path. A whole series of them, in fact, which aren't just there to fill time; they also neatly demonstrate the various talents Westley has picked up in his years as the Dread Pirate Roberts' valet and eventual successor. So, this scene is here to show us he's a brilliant swordsman. (A skill which, oddly enough, he doesn't really use for the remainder of the story, although there are moments where the threat of using it is important.)
For us to understand that Westley is a brilliant swordsman, we need his opponent to also be impressive. The chatter between the two early on establishes that they both know their shit on an intellectual level, and the work they do while chatting demonstrates its practical application. But we the audience also know Inigo's fighting with a handicap (and still expects to win), so the fact that his survival depends on him switching to his dominant hand? Tells us this guy in black is pretty damn good. And then they get up to that wall, and Inigo's winning . . . .
Where we discover the Man in Black was also fighting with his off hand.
It has less to do with his own purpose, and more to do with the writer's purpose in crafting the scene. Aside from being a dramatic reveal, a charming bit of parallelism, and a moment to subdivide the very long fight (that's something we'll talk about more later), it hammers home the fact that Westley is just that badass. Inigo, who's been set up as the consummate swordsman, has finally met his match.
(We should pause here to note that in many cases, it's a bad idea to have the only (apparent) reason for something be external to the story. "Because the author needed him to" is not a satisfactory answer to the question of "why did the hero do that?" It works here because the story already has its tongue planted pretty firmly in its cheek, and also because it isn't inconsistent with Westley's character.)
That's how I analyze the fight, anyway. I don't actually know what was in Goldman's head. So let me talk briefly about one of my own scenes. I don't claim it's brilliant stuff -- hell, I was nineteen when I wrote it -- but at least I know why it goes the way it does.
In Warrior (formerly known as Doppelganger), there's a scene where Mirage, one of the protagonists, gets jumped by a group of four Thornbloods. Externally, the reason for it is mostly plot: Mirage needs to get captured, so she can have a Very Important Encounter not long after. But I also wanted a chance to demonstrate something important to the story, which is that Mirage, for reasons of her nature, is gifted at combat beyond the norm. There are a few fights earlier in the story, but they're largely brief and against people who don't pose much of a challenge; the semi-exception, a scuffle with the assassin she's chasing, isn't a big set-piece either. (That comes later in the story.) So by putting Mirage against four highly trained opponents, I got a chance to really flex her muscles, so to speak.
Internally, there are of course two sides, Mirage and her opponents. Her goal, as I conceived of it, is primarily to get away. Four-to-one may be normal movie odds, but it's pretty bad in real life, and so her best bet is to escape. In pursuit of that, she is willing to kill, maim, or otherwise incapacitate them in any way she can, while trying to get to a door. The Thornbloods, by contrast, have been told to bring her in alive. This handicaps them in multiple ways: they show up with staves and bare hands, rather than the blades they'd rather be using; they can't risk injury that might kill her; and they can't let her escape. Furthermore, there's a character detail in that the group is being led by a woman who really detests Mirage. She's masked, so Mirage doesn't know it's her until the fight is over, but it does color the way I conceived of and wrote the scene.
Why does the question of purpose matter? On the internal level, it determines what the characters are willing and unwilling to do. You probably won't kill your best friend if the goal is just to make her give back the diary she stole from your dresser; on the other hand, if the guy you're fighting murdered your entire family and you want him to pay? Very few holds barred, there. On the external level, it determines how you put the fight on the page, and how it will end. Mirage's need to escape and not get surrounded meant the fight would be very kinetic, moving all over the room; the handicap on the Thornbloods meant she wouldn't be permanently hurt; the plot reason behind the whole thing meant it would end with her being captured; and the desire to show off Mirage's skills meant the whole thing got a fair bit of page time (about four pages all told).
Know why you're doing this fight. Know why your characters are doing it, too. Having to articulate those answers to yourself may give you interesting ideas for how it should go, or make you rethink why you're bothering in the first place. "Because it would be cool" is not inherently a bad answer -- that's at least partially the answer behind every fight scene I write -- but it probably shouldn't be the only one, unless you know you're writing for the sort of audience that will eat it up.
Feel free to discuss other examples (your own work included) in comments. The tension between the different purposes can be really fun to explore.
Yuletide assignment
No, I can't talk publicly about what I'm writing -- as they said, anonymous Yuletiders are anonymous! -- but I want the record to show that I totally called it.
(Okay, I called, like, three different possibilities, based on what I'd heard about the matching algorithm pairing the rarest things first. But I kept thinking I'd end up with this one, because there is potential for tasty irony in me writing it.)
Anyway, the extra-fun part is that once I get back from Thanksgiving and have the book off my desk, I get to revisit the source for my assignment!![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380442897i/1319734.gif)
kurayami_hime
, you should totally ping me for details. :-)
(Okay, I called, like, three different possibilities, based on what I'd heard about the matching algorithm pairing the rarest things first. But I kept thinking I'd end up with this one, because there is potential for tasty irony in me writing it.)
Anyway, the extra-fun part is that once I get back from Thanksgiving and have the book off my desk, I get to revisit the source for my assignment!
kurayami_hime
, you should totally ping me for details. :-)
November 20, 2010
Dear Yuletide Writer
Yuletide matches will be going out soon, so if you're the person who's been matched with me, look below the cut for further details on my requests.
Dear Yuletide Writer,
The funny thing is that I got roped into this challenge because there was a specific story I was really, really hoping somebody would write for me -- a crossover. Then I looked at the rules and discovered I had to request 3-4 fandoms. Well, the crossover took care of two of them, but what would be my third? I started browsing the list, and came up with possibilities, aaaaand . . . ended up getting really excited about my "second string" choice, too. So whichever of my requests you've been sent here for, rest assured that I will be delighted to see the result.
(Sorry for the rambly nature of this. I'm apparently feeling chatty today.)
Let's start with the thing I originally wanted, which involves two of my three requests:
A Hogfather/Nightmare Before Christmas crossover.
See, a couple of years ago I watched the TV adaptation of Hogfather (based on the Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett), and joked that it was tailor-made for a crossover with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. In both stories, the gift-giving holiday figure is taken out of commission, and his duties have to be picked up by a skeletal dude for whom holiday cheer isn't exactly in the normal job description. I mean, really. And, after mentioning one time too many that I felt this crossover fic needed to exist, I was told that I ought to sign up for Yuletide and see if somebody would write it for me.
The good news is, beyond the basic desire to see those two stories mashed together, I'm not choosy. You can pretty much do whatever floats your boat, plot-wise. I figure the story will probably be on the humorous side, given that neither source is terribly serious to begin with, but on the other hand, if you come up with some brilliantly twisted and dark idea? Go for it. (I'd prefer not deathfic-dark, though. Er, aside from the fact that one of the characters is actually, y'know, Death. More "thought-provoking edgy" than "graphic torture," please.) Playing off the matching of roles across the stories could be fun: Death and Jack Skellington, Hogfather and Father Christmas, Mr. Teatime and Oogie-Boogie, Susan and Sally, whatever. (Susan in general is awesome. I <3 Susan.) I imagine it as a holiday story, since both premises are, but other than that, knock yourself out with whatever idea catches your fancy.
(I should probably mention, though, that my knowledge of Discworld beyond Hogfather is very hit-and-miss. So bits of story that would depend on me knowing a lot about Sam Vimes, or that thing Death did in Mort that one time, may very well go over my head. Feel free to include other characters; I just figured I should warn you.)
What I really love about the sources: the humour, which is clever with just a slightly twisted bent.
If that isn't what you were sent here for, then let's move on to my second-string-oh-wait-that-really-does-sound-cool choice:
A Gabriel Knight "sequel" fic.
Okay, I admit it, I never got over the fact that Sierra didn't make a fourth game. It's Jane Jensen's fault -- the me not getting over it part, not the Sierra part -- for writing such narratively strong games, they had actual character arcs across the series. And then auuuuugghhhh I don't get closure because the series ends. fdslfkjsdkf.
Ahem. I would like a story about Gabriel and Grace, please, that will bring some kind of resolution (ideally of a happy sort) to what got left hanging at the end of GK3 -- namely, Grace's half-explained departure. By "resolution," I'm looking for something emotional; sex is okay, but not the part I care about. If you have the time, energy, and will, I would be over the moon to see this have an actual plot, with Gabriel tackling a new case. (Or Grace tackling one on her own, and then Gabe following her there.) But I recognize that would make for a pretty long story, so if you'd rather keep it simple, that's fine.
What I love about the source: Two things. First is the darkness in the stories: Gabe's horrific dreams in Sins of the Fathers, the whole business with von Glower in The Beast Within, etc. But I especially love that the darkness is tempered with humour; Gabe always has a snarky comment, even when he's busy trying not to be sliced in half by a giant bladed pendulum. Awful situations are so much more moving when people aren't being relentlessly doomful and serious about them.
Second -- and this is specific to the "if you write a case for them" option -- the way the plots are built off of setting and folklore and history. The role New Orleans played in the first story, and voodoo, and the mistakes of Gabriel's ancestor. Germany, and werewolves, and all the stuff with Ludwig and Wagner. Rennes-le-Chateau, and the vampires and Holy Grail legends, Solomon's Temple . . . you get the idea. Another Gabriel Knight mystery, set in a cool location, grounded in real details -- I would love a story like that to little tiny pieces. (The rumour was that the next game would have involved ghosts; I'm fine with that, or with any other supernatural thing that might float your personal boat.)
My tastes more generally: I like plot. Especially dramatic plot. Especially dramatic plot that leads to important character moments, because character is the major way I get into a story. Yay angst and emotional suffering, and then coming out the other side. Interpersonal rifts that get overcome the hard way, rather than just being a Big Misunderstanding. Violence doesn't bother me, so long as I feel it serves a narrative purpose, but I'm really not a fan of splatterpunk-style gore, especially when it's directed against women. (Not that I expect you're likely to write such a thing -- but it can't hurt to be clear.) I like verbally clever humour, but not humour that depends on gross-outs, embarrassment, or people being profoundly stupid. I adore characters who are very competent at what they do. Also characters who reveal an unexpected layer beneath the surface: the joker character who's suddenly serious, the hardass character with a squishy soft spot, the always-cool character that finally has a breakdown. Heroes teaming up with villains, because for the time being they have a common cause. Past decisions coming back to bite you. Dramatic last stands. . . . I'll stop there before I just end up listing all my personal narrative kinks. :-) (I don't have any fanfic of my own I can point you at, but there's always this, if you want data on what I write.)
All in all, I'm really excited about this. Being not usually part of the fanfic scene, I've never given or received stories as gifts, so the notion of receiving something written for me is quite touching. I hope you enjoy whatever you end up writing, and after the reveal, we can geek out about our mutual love for the source!
Dear Yuletide Writer,
The funny thing is that I got roped into this challenge because there was a specific story I was really, really hoping somebody would write for me -- a crossover. Then I looked at the rules and discovered I had to request 3-4 fandoms. Well, the crossover took care of two of them, but what would be my third? I started browsing the list, and came up with possibilities, aaaaand . . . ended up getting really excited about my "second string" choice, too. So whichever of my requests you've been sent here for, rest assured that I will be delighted to see the result.
(Sorry for the rambly nature of this. I'm apparently feeling chatty today.)
Let's start with the thing I originally wanted, which involves two of my three requests:
A Hogfather/Nightmare Before Christmas crossover.
See, a couple of years ago I watched the TV adaptation of Hogfather (based on the Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett), and joked that it was tailor-made for a crossover with Tim Burton's Nightmare Before Christmas. In both stories, the gift-giving holiday figure is taken out of commission, and his duties have to be picked up by a skeletal dude for whom holiday cheer isn't exactly in the normal job description. I mean, really. And, after mentioning one time too many that I felt this crossover fic needed to exist, I was told that I ought to sign up for Yuletide and see if somebody would write it for me.
The good news is, beyond the basic desire to see those two stories mashed together, I'm not choosy. You can pretty much do whatever floats your boat, plot-wise. I figure the story will probably be on the humorous side, given that neither source is terribly serious to begin with, but on the other hand, if you come up with some brilliantly twisted and dark idea? Go for it. (I'd prefer not deathfic-dark, though. Er, aside from the fact that one of the characters is actually, y'know, Death. More "thought-provoking edgy" than "graphic torture," please.) Playing off the matching of roles across the stories could be fun: Death and Jack Skellington, Hogfather and Father Christmas, Mr. Teatime and Oogie-Boogie, Susan and Sally, whatever. (Susan in general is awesome. I <3 Susan.) I imagine it as a holiday story, since both premises are, but other than that, knock yourself out with whatever idea catches your fancy.
(I should probably mention, though, that my knowledge of Discworld beyond Hogfather is very hit-and-miss. So bits of story that would depend on me knowing a lot about Sam Vimes, or that thing Death did in Mort that one time, may very well go over my head. Feel free to include other characters; I just figured I should warn you.)
What I really love about the sources: the humour, which is clever with just a slightly twisted bent.
If that isn't what you were sent here for, then let's move on to my second-string-oh-wait-that-really-does-sound-cool choice:
A Gabriel Knight "sequel" fic.
Okay, I admit it, I never got over the fact that Sierra didn't make a fourth game. It's Jane Jensen's fault -- the me not getting over it part, not the Sierra part -- for writing such narratively strong games, they had actual character arcs across the series. And then auuuuugghhhh I don't get closure because the series ends. fdslfkjsdkf.
Ahem. I would like a story about Gabriel and Grace, please, that will bring some kind of resolution (ideally of a happy sort) to what got left hanging at the end of GK3 -- namely, Grace's half-explained departure. By "resolution," I'm looking for something emotional; sex is okay, but not the part I care about. If you have the time, energy, and will, I would be over the moon to see this have an actual plot, with Gabriel tackling a new case. (Or Grace tackling one on her own, and then Gabe following her there.) But I recognize that would make for a pretty long story, so if you'd rather keep it simple, that's fine.
What I love about the source: Two things. First is the darkness in the stories: Gabe's horrific dreams in Sins of the Fathers, the whole business with von Glower in The Beast Within, etc. But I especially love that the darkness is tempered with humour; Gabe always has a snarky comment, even when he's busy trying not to be sliced in half by a giant bladed pendulum. Awful situations are so much more moving when people aren't being relentlessly doomful and serious about them.
Second -- and this is specific to the "if you write a case for them" option -- the way the plots are built off of setting and folklore and history. The role New Orleans played in the first story, and voodoo, and the mistakes of Gabriel's ancestor. Germany, and werewolves, and all the stuff with Ludwig and Wagner. Rennes-le-Chateau, and the vampires and Holy Grail legends, Solomon's Temple . . . you get the idea. Another Gabriel Knight mystery, set in a cool location, grounded in real details -- I would love a story like that to little tiny pieces. (The rumour was that the next game would have involved ghosts; I'm fine with that, or with any other supernatural thing that might float your personal boat.)
My tastes more generally: I like plot. Especially dramatic plot. Especially dramatic plot that leads to important character moments, because character is the major way I get into a story. Yay angst and emotional suffering, and then coming out the other side. Interpersonal rifts that get overcome the hard way, rather than just being a Big Misunderstanding. Violence doesn't bother me, so long as I feel it serves a narrative purpose, but I'm really not a fan of splatterpunk-style gore, especially when it's directed against women. (Not that I expect you're likely to write such a thing -- but it can't hurt to be clear.) I like verbally clever humour, but not humour that depends on gross-outs, embarrassment, or people being profoundly stupid. I adore characters who are very competent at what they do. Also characters who reveal an unexpected layer beneath the surface: the joker character who's suddenly serious, the hardass character with a squishy soft spot, the always-cool character that finally has a breakdown. Heroes teaming up with villains, because for the time being they have a common cause. Past decisions coming back to bite you. Dramatic last stands. . . . I'll stop there before I just end up listing all my personal narrative kinks. :-) (I don't have any fanfic of my own I can point you at, but there's always this, if you want data on what I write.)
All in all, I'm really excited about this. Being not usually part of the fanfic scene, I've never given or received stories as gifts, so the notion of receiving something written for me is quite touching. I hope you enjoy whatever you end up writing, and after the reveal, we can geek out about our mutual love for the source!
November 19, 2010
three cool links for your Friday
Unless you're on the other side of the planet from me, in which case I think it isn't Friday for you anymore.
The Justice League of America, Magnificent Seven-style -- Superman and Wonder Woman and so on translated into Japanese film idioms.
The most awesome Fallout LARP ever -- played on an abandoned base near St. Petersburg, Russia, which makes a fabulous atmosphere for a post-apocalyptic game. The costumes are even more fabulous, and the lengths they went to for setting up challenges . . . jaw-dropping. Just page down to look at the pictures, and know that your own LARP group? Is not this cool. (Unless you're a member of Albion.)
How cats drink -- "'Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,' Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving." The answer is pretty amazing.
The Justice League of America, Magnificent Seven-style -- Superman and Wonder Woman and so on translated into Japanese film idioms.
The most awesome Fallout LARP ever -- played on an abandoned base near St. Petersburg, Russia, which makes a fabulous atmosphere for a post-apocalyptic game. The costumes are even more fabulous, and the lengths they went to for setting up challenges . . . jaw-dropping. Just page down to look at the pictures, and know that your own LARP group? Is not this cool. (Unless you're a member of Albion.)
How cats drink -- "'Three and a half years ago, I was watching Cutta Cutta lap over breakfast,' Dr. Stocker said. Naturally, he wondered what hydrodynamic problems the cat might be solving." The answer is pretty amazing.
more things I bring upon myself
Things You Should Not Put Into Your Novel, No Matter How Good You Think Your Reason Is, Part Two:
Theosophy.
<swears at Madame Blavatsky>
<goes back to revising the book>
Theosophy.
<swears at Madame Blavatsky>
<goes back to revising the book>
November 18, 2010
jeebus
Whoa. Apparently I've picked up something like thirty-plus new readers since I started the "fight scenes" sequence of posts.
Hi, all! And welcome! This has actually put me up over five hundred readers, which is a nice little landmark; I feel like I should do something to celebrate it. Like giving away prizes.
As near as I can tell,
alpheratz
, you're Reader No. 500, so you win! And so does
everywherestars
, chosen by the highly scientific expedient of pulling up my profile, closing my eyes, and sticking the eraser end of a pencil randomly at my screen. E-mail me at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I'll give you a selection of prizes from my Box O' Books And Other Things I've Written.
(I know that not all of the 517 readers I currently have are necessarily still reading LJ, so if I don't hear back from
everywherestars
, I'll pick another recipient.)
BTW, I mentioned this to
alpheratz
in comments, but if you've read the entirety of the Lymond Chronicles and want onto the filter wherein I've been book-blogging the series (mostly just The Game of Kings so far), leave a note here. That particular project is on hiatus, but I have no objection to comments on old posts, so new readers are always welcome.
Hi, all! And welcome! This has actually put me up over five hundred readers, which is a nice little landmark; I feel like I should do something to celebrate it. Like giving away prizes.
As near as I can tell,
alpheratz
, you're Reader No. 500, so you win! And so does
everywherestars
, chosen by the highly scientific expedient of pulling up my profile, closing my eyes, and sticking the eraser end of a pencil randomly at my screen. E-mail me at marie [dot] brennan [at] gmail [dot] com, and I'll give you a selection of prizes from my Box O' Books And Other Things I've Written.(I know that not all of the 517 readers I currently have are necessarily still reading LJ, so if I don't hear back from
everywherestars
, I'll pick another recipient.)BTW, I mentioned this to
alpheratz
in comments, but if you've read the entirety of the Lymond Chronicles and want onto the filter wherein I've been book-blogging the series (mostly just The Game of Kings so far), leave a note here. That particular project is on hiatus, but I have no objection to comments on old posts, so new readers are always welcome.
I bring these things upon myself
For the amount I'm having to juggle who knows what about whom and when they know it (and when they don't), I really ought to have a mystery novel to show for it.
Instead, I have an Onyx Court book that makes me want to tear my hair out.
Let this be a lesson to all concerned: never inflict amnesia on multiple characters at once. (No matter how good your reason for it may be.)
Ah well. L'Editor liked it -- quite a bit -- so there's that stressor removed; I do still need to do a lot of work, but it's entirely of my own making. Can't really blame anybody but myself for that.
Oh, hey! The "l'editor" thing reminded me. If you're a fluent French speaker and could spare me a few minutes of work checking a handful of lines from this story, please drop me a line, either in comments or by e-mail. It isn't much, but I should probably fix it before this goes to the copy-editor.
Instead, I have an Onyx Court book that makes me want to tear my hair out.
Let this be a lesson to all concerned: never inflict amnesia on multiple characters at once. (No matter how good your reason for it may be.)
Ah well. L'Editor liked it -- quite a bit -- so there's that stressor removed; I do still need to do a lot of work, but it's entirely of my own making. Can't really blame anybody but myself for that.
Oh, hey! The "l'editor" thing reminded me. If you're a fluent French speaker and could spare me a few minutes of work checking a handful of lines from this story, please drop me a line, either in comments or by e-mail. It isn't much, but I should probably fix it before this goes to the copy-editor.
Wheel of Time side post: On Women
I promised a while ago that I would make a post about the depiction of women in the Wheel of Time, and have had the result sitting around not quite finished for more than a month. Since I'm about to buckle down for the last push on revising With Fate Conspire, I might as well get this out of the way and off my mind.
Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don't do half so well on that front.
Furthermore, the women aren't there to be damsels in distress. They don't get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand's angst over the death of women aside, I'd have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren't even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else's, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn't long before she's doing far more important things.
That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?
For me, the heart of the problem is encapsulated by the old Aes Sedai symbol. It is, of course, the familiar yin-yang sign -- but without the dots of reversed color. I don't know if this is true, but I heard once that the reason for those dots was to show that the two opposing principles each contained the seed of the other; they aren't matter and anti-matter, annihilating upon contact, but rather a cycle endlessly transforming.
Except in Randland, where there is no such happy crossover.
It's been a long time since I read any interviews with Jordan, so I no longer have precise quotes to back this up, but the things he said there made it abundantly clear that he subscribed to a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" paradigm. Forget nuance; forget the role of cultural conditioning, and the possibility that there are many different ways to be a woman (or for that matter, a man). Nope, women are all the same in certain fundamental respects -- respects which, when I read them, sounded utterly alien to my feminine self.
Fantasy is prone to essentialism, saying that X group or thing is Fundamentally Like This. I understand why; myths rarely feature complex characterization and subtle motivation. Evil things are evil, good things are good, etc. I've long thought that fantasy as a genre has to grapple with that tension, between archetype and reality. We definitely have to think about what archetypes we use, especially when they get inscribed on the level of cosmology.
As they do here. The One Power is more like two, based on gender. (Or sex, but I seem to recall "Halima" using saidin, so really it seems to depend on some unalterable characteristic of the soul.) The difference itself is gendered: saidar, the female power, must be embraced, and all the metaphorical images used to assist in doing so are things like flowers opening up to the sun. Saidin, on the other hand, must be seized, and using it is a constant battle for control, where any instant of weakness gets you burned. Men don't embrace things, and women don't seize them -- and the two paradigms are so mutually incomprehensible that women cannot teach men anything useful about channeling, nor vice versa.
Furthermore, men and women innately have different strengths when it comes to the elements. Women incline to Water and Air; men incline to Fire and Earth. (They share Spirit equally.) There are good arguments in favor of no element being "stronger" than the others -- but you could still have that, without inscribing the elements onto genders. Of course, if we want to talk about inscribed differences, how about the fact that men are inherently stronger in the Power? Women have their own advantage, of course: they can link, which men can't do without a woman's help. (See, women are good at working together!) The dynamics of who leads are pretty damned complicated, but let me tease out one pattern for you: there is only condition under which a woman must lead, and that's if the participation of men in an expanded circle is at its absolute minimum. One man and one woman? Man leads. Maximized circle? Man leads, again. This isn't a matter of society and conditioning; it's the way Jordan has chosen to design his universe. Period, the end.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened when some old Aes Sedai tried to find a source of power that wouldn't be divided by sex and/or gender: they freed the Dark One. That's right, folks; trying to escape the essentialized gender binary leads straight to evil. Whee!
Let's leave cosmology behind and talk about society. The first one we see is Emond's Field, which likewise subscribes to a "separate but theoretically equal" model of influence: the Village Council and the Women's Circle. The men seem to operate by sitting around drinking and debating what they should do. Women get together -- I think in a more behind-the-scenes fashion, rather than formal meetings held in a "public" building like the inn -- where they cook up their own plans, and then plot how to get the men to think it's their own idea.
Because that's how women get things done: by manipulating men. Because of this, men have to hide what they're doing if they want any freedom. Women are killjoys, you see, always disapproving of fun things like drinking and gambling, and trying to make men eat their vegetables. No, really: there's a whole running thing in The Fires of Heaven where Nynaeve and Elayne are bitching about how they can't send Thom and Juilin to buy suppllies because the men will just come back with meat, no green things. It's like all the men are nine, and all the women are their mothers.
And the thing is, this doesn't seem to vary by culture. The Aiel have the clan chiefs, and also the Wise Ones, who scheme how to get the clan chiefs to do what they want. Roofmistresses, like housewives back in Emond's Field, rule authoritatively over the domestic sphere. Their physical environments could not be more different, which ought to mean their societies are, too -- and yet the things Aiel men say about Aiel women, and vice versa, could frequently be subbed in for Emond's Fielders without a hitch. (There are exceptions, of course, especially where sexual matters are concerned. But still: the sense of what masculine and feminine gender mean don't seem nearly as different as they could, or should, be.)
The poisonous effect of this pattern shows up in the language used to describe the interactions between the sexes. When a woman gets a man to do what she wants, it's frequently described as "bullying" -- the abusive exercise of force or coercion. Not persuasion, or even simple logic, the woman saying something the man acknowledges as a good point. What's our model for a woman successfully (and non-bullying-ly) influencing a man? Moiraine and Rand, apparently. She doesn't get anywhere with him until she promises to obey, whereupon her obedience elicits the same from him. Apparently Rand is saidar, and she has to submit and open up in order to control. It's a valid method, but it shouldn't be the only one; what I don't remember is whether later books give us a competing model, some other Aes Sedai who successfully changes Rand's mind via rational arguments or whatever.
And then there's the oddity that women never seem to use that model among themselves. The closest example I can think of is Siuan and Leane after their arrival in Salidar, where they put up a pretense of obedience to cover their manipulation. We more frequently get a running motif of "Woman A is so strong and hard! But here's Woman B, who's even stronger and harder, so much so that she can either beat Woman A into submission or verbally whip her until she cries!" Nynaeve gets trumped by Moiraine, Moiraine gets trumped by Siuan, Amys gives them both a run for her money and then gets trumped by Sorilea, and we haven't even gotten to Cadsuane yet. I want to see the woman who isn't intimidating at all, but who is acknowledged to be so brilliant that when she renders an opinion, those hard-ass women listen.
When it comes time to train the women, again, it's all about force. Jordan is way too fond of it for my taste: whether it's the Aes Sedai or the Wise Ones or whoever, shortcoming or disobedience among the students is punished with physical abuse, humiliation, or scut work -- often naked. And the punished individual frequently ends up crying. These are techniques used in many real-life situations, of course, but something about the presentation rubs me the wrong way, maybe because of how often the women are naked and/or crying. Or maybe because the same thing never seems to happen to the men: when Asmodean fails to cooperate, Rand doesn't channel to hurt him until Asmodean bawls for mercy. To the best of my recollection, the Asha'man aren't sent to run naked around the Black Tower in freezing weather. Men don't resort to switching, birching, or beating each other with shoes at the drop of a hat. Partly this is because the male characters are much less often in a training situation than the female ones are -- but that's a choice, too, and tells us something. Mat doesn't have to apprentice himself to Gareth Bryne for months to be a military genius; he gets it magically instead.
All of it, of course, is made more obnoxious by what I can best sum up as "bitchy hypocrisy." This really gets rolling in The Fires of Heaven, which is why I cooked up most of this post after reading that book. Nynaeve goes on endlessly about Elayne's "viperish" tongue, but of course she uses nothing but sweet reason, right? <eyeroll> Leigh Butler over on Tor.com found that sequence funny, but it didn't amuse me in the slightest. In theory, it could have worked; sometimes people really are hypocritical. But Jordan's not good enough at characterization to sell me on it. Instead he clubs me over the head with that motif, over and over again, Nynaeve judging Elayne, Elayne judging Nynaeve, Egwene judging them both, them judging her, until I just wanted to gag them all.
Especially because of the way it spills over to the interactions between the sexes. In TFoH, Nynaeve literally thinks about how she'll yell at Thom and Juilin if they try to intervene in the situation with Luca . . . and then gets pissed at them because they don't. Likewise, she gets angry at them for doing something useful before she gives them the orders to do so. To be fair, Nynaeve's currently in the stage of trying to circumvent her block by being angry all the time, but it isn't just her; if I had to sum up this feminine dynamic in one word, that word would be "strident." And it gets so very, very tiring.
To close this out, I want to talk about relationships. The TFoH post dealt with the sex half of it already, but there's also romance to consider, and the way in which it fails to be convincing.
The thing is, men and women almost never seem to be friends. If I'd been thinking about this sooner, I would have kept an eye out for whether the books ever use that word for someone of the opposite gender. There are romances, and there are mothering relationships (usually unwelcome); there are hierarchical setups and the occasional bit of armed detente, but very few simple friendships. Moiraine and Lan, sort of, but it's complicated by the Warder bond. Mat and Birgitte. I feel like Rand and Nynaeve achieve something of the sort circa Winter's Heart; hopefully that won't turn out to be wishful reading when I get back to it. Egwene and Rand should be, but the whole "she's Aes Sedai and a Wise One" dynamic warps it.
Of the romances, I randomly like Chiad and Gaul. Why? Because it's mostly offstage, which means my imagination can work without having to get past the actual story first. The rest generally fall too heavily on the "tsun" side of tsundere. What does Aviendha see in Rand? What does he see in her? From another author, it might be physical attraction, but we've already discussed how little that figures into these books. It could work for me if it had to do with Rand's respect for the Aiel, and Aviendha's respect for his determination to learn about them, but that particular narrative exists mostly in my head, not on the page. Elayne and Rand are even worse: they fall in love when they've barely even spoken with one another. It ain't lust, and there isn't much else it could be, either; I'm forced to conclude it's fate. <sigh>
Aside from Chiad and Gaul, I do like Lan and Nynaeve, and for one simple reason: I can see that they respect each other, and I understand why. Nynaeve herself sometimes gets in the way of me liking that relationship (until she gets over her block), and okay Lan's side is pretty thoroughly cliche, but at least I can point to what got them started: Nynaeve's determined and successful pursuit of the Emond's Fielders back in TEotW. It's a foundation I can believe in, more than I do with the others. Contrast them with Faile and Perrin, who almost have a very similar foundation . . . but I can't see the respect there, not on her side. Since there are plenty of reasons to respect Perrin, Faile's shitty treatment of him makes her look all the worse. And unspoken incidents of Perrin apparently spanking Faile when she gets out of order don't do his image any good, either.
Fundamentally, though, the reason why the romances aren't convincing is that the women aren't convincing. Jordan's view of the innate nature of the female creature isn't one I recognize in myself, nor in most of my female friends. So half of the equation has already fallen down, making it hard for the whole to stand up.
Given how important women are to the story, it frustrates me to see them badly handled. If they had more variety, if they interacted differently with the men around them and didn't all have that strident edge, I'd be holding the Wheel of Time up as a fine example of epic fantasy that does gender issues right. Instead Jordan reverses the pattern I see with other authors: instead of a tiny number of interesting characters who don't get enough to do, he has a large number of repetitive clones that carry a lot of the plot. I'm honestly not sure which one annoys me more.
Before I get to the complaints, though, let me say a few things about what Jordan does right. To begin with, he passes the Bechdel Test with flying colors. Even in the first book, Egwene, Nynaeve, and Moiraine are all significant characters, and once the story moves off to the White Tower in The Great Hunt, the importance of women to the plot is firmly assured. I can think of a distressing number of recent epic fantasies that don't do half so well on that front.
Furthermore, the women aren't there to be damsels in distress. They don't get captured or tortured or raped, or killed off to upset the hero. Rand's angst over the death of women aside, I'd have to go searching to find anyone stuffed into the refrigerator; no significant examples of that leap to mind. Heck, most of them aren't even love interests: Egwene and Nynaeve both have their own romances, rather than being the object of someone else's, and while Elayne may have been introduced in that role, it isn't long before she's doing far more important things.
That stuff is all good. So why do the women of the Wheel of Time get so badly up my nose?
For me, the heart of the problem is encapsulated by the old Aes Sedai symbol. It is, of course, the familiar yin-yang sign -- but without the dots of reversed color. I don't know if this is true, but I heard once that the reason for those dots was to show that the two opposing principles each contained the seed of the other; they aren't matter and anti-matter, annihilating upon contact, but rather a cycle endlessly transforming.
Except in Randland, where there is no such happy crossover.
It's been a long time since I read any interviews with Jordan, so I no longer have precise quotes to back this up, but the things he said there made it abundantly clear that he subscribed to a "men are from Mars, women are from Venus" paradigm. Forget nuance; forget the role of cultural conditioning, and the possibility that there are many different ways to be a woman (or for that matter, a man). Nope, women are all the same in certain fundamental respects -- respects which, when I read them, sounded utterly alien to my feminine self.
Fantasy is prone to essentialism, saying that X group or thing is Fundamentally Like This. I understand why; myths rarely feature complex characterization and subtle motivation. Evil things are evil, good things are good, etc. I've long thought that fantasy as a genre has to grapple with that tension, between archetype and reality. We definitely have to think about what archetypes we use, especially when they get inscribed on the level of cosmology.
As they do here. The One Power is more like two, based on gender. (Or sex, but I seem to recall "Halima" using saidin, so really it seems to depend on some unalterable characteristic of the soul.) The difference itself is gendered: saidar, the female power, must be embraced, and all the metaphorical images used to assist in doing so are things like flowers opening up to the sun. Saidin, on the other hand, must be seized, and using it is a constant battle for control, where any instant of weakness gets you burned. Men don't embrace things, and women don't seize them -- and the two paradigms are so mutually incomprehensible that women cannot teach men anything useful about channeling, nor vice versa.
Furthermore, men and women innately have different strengths when it comes to the elements. Women incline to Water and Air; men incline to Fire and Earth. (They share Spirit equally.) There are good arguments in favor of no element being "stronger" than the others -- but you could still have that, without inscribing the elements onto genders. Of course, if we want to talk about inscribed differences, how about the fact that men are inherently stronger in the Power? Women have their own advantage, of course: they can link, which men can't do without a woman's help. (See, women are good at working together!) The dynamics of who leads are pretty damned complicated, but let me tease out one pattern for you: there is only condition under which a woman must lead, and that's if the participation of men in an expanded circle is at its absolute minimum. One man and one woman? Man leads. Maximized circle? Man leads, again. This isn't a matter of society and conditioning; it's the way Jordan has chosen to design his universe. Period, the end.
Oh, and let's not forget what happened when some old Aes Sedai tried to find a source of power that wouldn't be divided by sex and/or gender: they freed the Dark One. That's right, folks; trying to escape the essentialized gender binary leads straight to evil. Whee!
Let's leave cosmology behind and talk about society. The first one we see is Emond's Field, which likewise subscribes to a "separate but theoretically equal" model of influence: the Village Council and the Women's Circle. The men seem to operate by sitting around drinking and debating what they should do. Women get together -- I think in a more behind-the-scenes fashion, rather than formal meetings held in a "public" building like the inn -- where they cook up their own plans, and then plot how to get the men to think it's their own idea.
Because that's how women get things done: by manipulating men. Because of this, men have to hide what they're doing if they want any freedom. Women are killjoys, you see, always disapproving of fun things like drinking and gambling, and trying to make men eat their vegetables. No, really: there's a whole running thing in The Fires of Heaven where Nynaeve and Elayne are bitching about how they can't send Thom and Juilin to buy suppllies because the men will just come back with meat, no green things. It's like all the men are nine, and all the women are their mothers.
And the thing is, this doesn't seem to vary by culture. The Aiel have the clan chiefs, and also the Wise Ones, who scheme how to get the clan chiefs to do what they want. Roofmistresses, like housewives back in Emond's Field, rule authoritatively over the domestic sphere. Their physical environments could not be more different, which ought to mean their societies are, too -- and yet the things Aiel men say about Aiel women, and vice versa, could frequently be subbed in for Emond's Fielders without a hitch. (There are exceptions, of course, especially where sexual matters are concerned. But still: the sense of what masculine and feminine gender mean don't seem nearly as different as they could, or should, be.)
The poisonous effect of this pattern shows up in the language used to describe the interactions between the sexes. When a woman gets a man to do what she wants, it's frequently described as "bullying" -- the abusive exercise of force or coercion. Not persuasion, or even simple logic, the woman saying something the man acknowledges as a good point. What's our model for a woman successfully (and non-bullying-ly) influencing a man? Moiraine and Rand, apparently. She doesn't get anywhere with him until she promises to obey, whereupon her obedience elicits the same from him. Apparently Rand is saidar, and she has to submit and open up in order to control. It's a valid method, but it shouldn't be the only one; what I don't remember is whether later books give us a competing model, some other Aes Sedai who successfully changes Rand's mind via rational arguments or whatever.
And then there's the oddity that women never seem to use that model among themselves. The closest example I can think of is Siuan and Leane after their arrival in Salidar, where they put up a pretense of obedience to cover their manipulation. We more frequently get a running motif of "Woman A is so strong and hard! But here's Woman B, who's even stronger and harder, so much so that she can either beat Woman A into submission or verbally whip her until she cries!" Nynaeve gets trumped by Moiraine, Moiraine gets trumped by Siuan, Amys gives them both a run for her money and then gets trumped by Sorilea, and we haven't even gotten to Cadsuane yet. I want to see the woman who isn't intimidating at all, but who is acknowledged to be so brilliant that when she renders an opinion, those hard-ass women listen.
When it comes time to train the women, again, it's all about force. Jordan is way too fond of it for my taste: whether it's the Aes Sedai or the Wise Ones or whoever, shortcoming or disobedience among the students is punished with physical abuse, humiliation, or scut work -- often naked. And the punished individual frequently ends up crying. These are techniques used in many real-life situations, of course, but something about the presentation rubs me the wrong way, maybe because of how often the women are naked and/or crying. Or maybe because the same thing never seems to happen to the men: when Asmodean fails to cooperate, Rand doesn't channel to hurt him until Asmodean bawls for mercy. To the best of my recollection, the Asha'man aren't sent to run naked around the Black Tower in freezing weather. Men don't resort to switching, birching, or beating each other with shoes at the drop of a hat. Partly this is because the male characters are much less often in a training situation than the female ones are -- but that's a choice, too, and tells us something. Mat doesn't have to apprentice himself to Gareth Bryne for months to be a military genius; he gets it magically instead.
All of it, of course, is made more obnoxious by what I can best sum up as "bitchy hypocrisy." This really gets rolling in The Fires of Heaven, which is why I cooked up most of this post after reading that book. Nynaeve goes on endlessly about Elayne's "viperish" tongue, but of course she uses nothing but sweet reason, right? <eyeroll> Leigh Butler over on Tor.com found that sequence funny, but it didn't amuse me in the slightest. In theory, it could have worked; sometimes people really are hypocritical. But Jordan's not good enough at characterization to sell me on it. Instead he clubs me over the head with that motif, over and over again, Nynaeve judging Elayne, Elayne judging Nynaeve, Egwene judging them both, them judging her, until I just wanted to gag them all.
Especially because of the way it spills over to the interactions between the sexes. In TFoH, Nynaeve literally thinks about how she'll yell at Thom and Juilin if they try to intervene in the situation with Luca . . . and then gets pissed at them because they don't. Likewise, she gets angry at them for doing something useful before she gives them the orders to do so. To be fair, Nynaeve's currently in the stage of trying to circumvent her block by being angry all the time, but it isn't just her; if I had to sum up this feminine dynamic in one word, that word would be "strident." And it gets so very, very tiring.
To close this out, I want to talk about relationships. The TFoH post dealt with the sex half of it already, but there's also romance to consider, and the way in which it fails to be convincing.
The thing is, men and women almost never seem to be friends. If I'd been thinking about this sooner, I would have kept an eye out for whether the books ever use that word for someone of the opposite gender. There are romances, and there are mothering relationships (usually unwelcome); there are hierarchical setups and the occasional bit of armed detente, but very few simple friendships. Moiraine and Lan, sort of, but it's complicated by the Warder bond. Mat and Birgitte. I feel like Rand and Nynaeve achieve something of the sort circa Winter's Heart; hopefully that won't turn out to be wishful reading when I get back to it. Egwene and Rand should be, but the whole "she's Aes Sedai and a Wise One" dynamic warps it.
Of the romances, I randomly like Chiad and Gaul. Why? Because it's mostly offstage, which means my imagination can work without having to get past the actual story first. The rest generally fall too heavily on the "tsun" side of tsundere. What does Aviendha see in Rand? What does he see in her? From another author, it might be physical attraction, but we've already discussed how little that figures into these books. It could work for me if it had to do with Rand's respect for the Aiel, and Aviendha's respect for his determination to learn about them, but that particular narrative exists mostly in my head, not on the page. Elayne and Rand are even worse: they fall in love when they've barely even spoken with one another. It ain't lust, and there isn't much else it could be, either; I'm forced to conclude it's fate. <sigh>
Aside from Chiad and Gaul, I do like Lan and Nynaeve, and for one simple reason: I can see that they respect each other, and I understand why. Nynaeve herself sometimes gets in the way of me liking that relationship (until she gets over her block), and okay Lan's side is pretty thoroughly cliche, but at least I can point to what got them started: Nynaeve's determined and successful pursuit of the Emond's Fielders back in TEotW. It's a foundation I can believe in, more than I do with the others. Contrast them with Faile and Perrin, who almost have a very similar foundation . . . but I can't see the respect there, not on her side. Since there are plenty of reasons to respect Perrin, Faile's shitty treatment of him makes her look all the worse. And unspoken incidents of Perrin apparently spanking Faile when she gets out of order don't do his image any good, either.
Fundamentally, though, the reason why the romances aren't convincing is that the women aren't convincing. Jordan's view of the innate nature of the female creature isn't one I recognize in myself, nor in most of my female friends. So half of the equation has already fallen down, making it hard for the whole to stand up.
Given how important women are to the story, it frustrates me to see them badly handled. If they had more variety, if they interacted differently with the men around them and didn't all have that strident edge, I'd be holding the Wheel of Time up as a fine example of epic fantasy that does gender issues right. Instead Jordan reverses the pattern I see with other authors: instead of a tiny number of interesting characters who don't get enough to do, he has a large number of repetitive clones that carry a lot of the plot. I'm honestly not sure which one annoys me more.
