A small mea culpa
May 2nd, 2012 § Leave a Comment
Last night I dumped a load of fertilizer on a blogger named acrackedmoon, and her blog Requires only that you Hate. Specifically, I took issue with her personal attacks upon and general douchbaggery toward a fantasy writer named R. Scott Bakker, who has many books out and runs a philosophically driven blog called Three Pound Brain. ACM wrote this post, as well as this post, and he’s responded with this post, among others. It goes on.
I will forever say that bullying is wrong, and ACM’s posts about Bakker are bullying.
But… I was looking at her blog today, and she’d written a review of Earth Logic, by Laurie Marks. I’d heard of neither the author or the book, but knowing ACM, I was expecting her to bathe it in the heat of her estrogen flame-thrower.
But lo and behold, it was a fair and balanced review. She made it sound like a good book! Yes, she used words like ‘homonormativity,’ but I wasn’t frightened away.
I’m sorry but no amount of being transformed into Sainnites by anger is worse than waking up every day with the knowledge that you’ll be raped. Repeatedly. For, I don’t know, however long it is that Karis’ owner started having her raped. Years, certainly.
I don’t think Laurie J. Marks is out to trivialize rape, far from it, but quite honestly she’s far too sold on her “to stop a war we must have understanding and forgiveness, not rage and vengeance” schtick that it permeates every single narrative thread. It’s too one-note and single-minded, to the point that it overtakes all other considerations and becomes the axis on which the series turns. And even if the idea itself is noble, it’s not a really good axis.
Moving on, the homonormativity of this book is beautiful:
It wasn’t an utter and abject tongue-bath; as you can see, she did make criticisms.
I guess I’m confused. Why the douchebag attacks, why the pathetic circle-jerks parties in her comments, when she is capable of rational and objective criticism? Then I counted the comments: her honest and insult-free review of Water Logic has one comment, her drive-by skunkings garner hundreds of comments, plus arouse near ethnic-cleansing levels of butthurt. I suppose no one would pay for violence-free professional hockey, either.
This is the result of good criticism: This afternoon I went out and bought Fire Logic, the first book of Marks’s trilogy, and Bakker’s Neuropath; the first because she made it sound like a great book (and I don’t give a hoot about homonormativity), for the second because while I’ve been defending R. Scott Bakker, I haven’t read Nearopath or any his books of more classic fantasy (although ACM has said that she was unable to finish Neuropath). Maybe ACM will be right about the Marks books and, inconveniently, right about Bakker’s books. In a few days I’ll know. Although I will say I’ve started Neuropath, and it doesn’t yet seem to be the pit of misogynist dreck that ACM describes. I haven’t gotten to the sex scenes, though.