Influence
Been reading a whole lot of YA for Norton duty. But this observation isn't confined to YA, it's just that I've seen a bunch of this one attribute in a few novels.
Ten to twenty years ago, you could tell who'd been reading Dorothy Dunnett; the most obvious ones got set in Scotland, the story centering around a cute guy who was inevitably raped by the villain and/or then flogged (with looong descriptions thereof) then there was a set of them not set in Scotland but the feel was a bit of "A Nervous Splendor" and the center was usually a cute guy who was gonna be tortured. The third set was farther removed, what I began to think of as creative dialogues with Dunnett, though I might be the only one who sees them that way. Kind of like Ursula K. Le Guin's first Earthsea story felt to me like a dialogue with Tolkien's LOTR, though each succeeding novel moved farther away from that sense. (And oh yeah, there was a lot of that Tolkien influence going on through the seventies.)
Well, anyway, after having read a bunch of current urban fantasies, it seems to me there's sure a lot of Joss Whedon influence cropping up in distinctive character traits, dramatic situations, and especially emo-drama. Or am I hallucinating?
Ten to twenty years ago, you could tell who'd been reading Dorothy Dunnett; the most obvious ones got set in Scotland, the story centering around a cute guy who was inevitably raped by the villain and/or then flogged (with looong descriptions thereof) then there was a set of them not set in Scotland but the feel was a bit of "A Nervous Splendor" and the center was usually a cute guy who was gonna be tortured. The third set was farther removed, what I began to think of as creative dialogues with Dunnett, though I might be the only one who sees them that way. Kind of like Ursula K. Le Guin's first Earthsea story felt to me like a dialogue with Tolkien's LOTR, though each succeeding novel moved farther away from that sense. (And oh yeah, there was a lot of that Tolkien influence going on through the seventies.)
Well, anyway, after having read a bunch of current urban fantasies, it seems to me there's sure a lot of Joss Whedon influence cropping up in distinctive character traits, dramatic situations, and especially emo-drama. Or am I hallucinating?