(no subject)
Man, I still feel really crappy. This is annoying.
Anyway! In order to deal with the crappiness, I have been reading mindcandy urban fantasy, and I finally figured out what's really been bugging me about Carolyn Crane's Disillusionist series. Which, if you haven't read it or heard of it, is basically about a group of mentally ill people going around projecting their mental illness into evil people until the evil people are so broken they give up on being evil and become good people. It's actually a pretty fun and interesting read in some ways, but there's a lot that bugs me about it.
1. Having mentally ill characters project what makes them unstable into other people in order to temporarily cure them bugs me on multiple levels. For the most part the author's going for mental illnesses that are substantial in a way people recognize (despairing at the state of the world around them, compulsive gambler, completely negative on the possibility of happiess, hypochondriac) rather than, say, having ADHD or schizophrenia. And it's damaging to them, but. For the most part they strike me as more symptoms of mental illness rather than the cause of their mental illness, and continually conflating the two bugs me.
2. Also I am really unconvinced that breaking evil people like that really is going to result in them becoming models of good behavior and cause them to found charities and suchlike. I'd expect them mostly to commit suicide, judging by the descriptions of what's done to them.
3. I find no one even contemplating killing a person who has a history of controlling people in their sleep to make them eat people alive and who's just gained the power to control key characters in their sleep to be really odd. Basically killing's beyond the pale in this series, but torturing them with mental illnesses for their own good is a-okay. Which. What.
4. Both the heroine's potential love interests have done things appalling enough to her that I think she should just dump them both. Seriously. Aaaand I didn't really get the impression that the author had thought through the ending of the latest book in order to realize that what was going on was rape in any real sense. I mean, she dumped him for someone else, he killed her best friend's boyfriend in front of her, and then he forcibly wiped her memories of realizing she was in love with the other guy and dumping him, and replaced them with memories of the other guy killing her best friend's boyfriend. And proceeds to go right back to dating her and asking her to marry him, with presumably the same active sex life they enjoyed before. That's rape by any standard I can name, and while it's presented as a horrible violation, I...don't really have enough trust in the author at this point to know that it's going to be presented as also a sexual as well as a mental violation in the next book.
Basically, the morals in this are really skewed. And I like skewed morals in my characters when it feels like the author's thought it through and the characters are at least modestly self-aware. But it's really not.
Also I read the latest in Jennifer Estep's assassin series. And I still totally ship the assassin/the mob boss whose death will be the climax of the series, because there's so not enough lesbian hatesex with very dangerous women. /deep and important thoughts
In completely other news, I keep thinking about starting a DW journal solely for my essays on my RP characters. a) I'm grumpy enough at LJ over all its cumulative fail that I'm starting to be more meh about providing it content b) I'd kind of like all my essays for all my characters in one place, and c) it might get me over the block on finishing any of my 8 gazillion essays. Seriously, I just counted and I have 8 on Rika, 3 on Ferdinand, 2 on Higurashi in general that I'm debating whether they're a RP essay or a more general thinky thing, most of which are just lacking one or two concluding paragraphs. Lately I've been doing the same thing to essays that I have a horrible habit of doing to my fiction (namely, deciding I don't like them and deleting them entirely), and it's bugging the crap out of me because I like essaying. So idk, maybe changing things up would help.
Any username ideas? I have to admit I'm terrible at usernames.
This entry was originally posted at opusculus @ DW. There are
comments over there. Want to talk?
Anyway! In order to deal with the crappiness, I have been reading mindcandy urban fantasy, and I finally figured out what's really been bugging me about Carolyn Crane's Disillusionist series. Which, if you haven't read it or heard of it, is basically about a group of mentally ill people going around projecting their mental illness into evil people until the evil people are so broken they give up on being evil and become good people. It's actually a pretty fun and interesting read in some ways, but there's a lot that bugs me about it.
1. Having mentally ill characters project what makes them unstable into other people in order to temporarily cure them bugs me on multiple levels. For the most part the author's going for mental illnesses that are substantial in a way people recognize (despairing at the state of the world around them, compulsive gambler, completely negative on the possibility of happiess, hypochondriac) rather than, say, having ADHD or schizophrenia. And it's damaging to them, but. For the most part they strike me as more symptoms of mental illness rather than the cause of their mental illness, and continually conflating the two bugs me.
2. Also I am really unconvinced that breaking evil people like that really is going to result in them becoming models of good behavior and cause them to found charities and suchlike. I'd expect them mostly to commit suicide, judging by the descriptions of what's done to them.
3. I find no one even contemplating killing a person who has a history of controlling people in their sleep to make them eat people alive and who's just gained the power to control key characters in their sleep to be really odd. Basically killing's beyond the pale in this series, but torturing them with mental illnesses for their own good is a-okay. Which. What.
4. Both the heroine's potential love interests have done things appalling enough to her that I think she should just dump them both. Seriously. Aaaand I didn't really get the impression that the author had thought through the ending of the latest book in order to realize that what was going on was rape in any real sense. I mean, she dumped him for someone else, he killed her best friend's boyfriend in front of her, and then he forcibly wiped her memories of realizing she was in love with the other guy and dumping him, and replaced them with memories of the other guy killing her best friend's boyfriend. And proceeds to go right back to dating her and asking her to marry him, with presumably the same active sex life they enjoyed before. That's rape by any standard I can name, and while it's presented as a horrible violation, I...don't really have enough trust in the author at this point to know that it's going to be presented as also a sexual as well as a mental violation in the next book.
Basically, the morals in this are really skewed. And I like skewed morals in my characters when it feels like the author's thought it through and the characters are at least modestly self-aware. But it's really not.
Also I read the latest in Jennifer Estep's assassin series. And I still totally ship the assassin/the mob boss whose death will be the climax of the series, because there's so not enough lesbian hatesex with very dangerous women. /deep and important thoughts
In completely other news, I keep thinking about starting a DW journal solely for my essays on my RP characters. a) I'm grumpy enough at LJ over all its cumulative fail that I'm starting to be more meh about providing it content b) I'd kind of like all my essays for all my characters in one place, and c) it might get me over the block on finishing any of my 8 gazillion essays. Seriously, I just counted and I have 8 on Rika, 3 on Ferdinand, 2 on Higurashi in general that I'm debating whether they're a RP essay or a more general thinky thing, most of which are just lacking one or two concluding paragraphs. Lately I've been doing the same thing to essays that I have a horrible habit of doing to my fiction (namely, deciding I don't like them and deleting them entirely), and it's bugging the crap out of me because I like essaying. So idk, maybe changing things up would help.
Any username ideas? I have to admit I'm terrible at usernames.
This entry was originally posted at opusculus @ DW. There are
comments over there. Want to talk?