Appreciating Mercedes Lackey

[snarp]

I’m rereading the Dragonriders books. Yes, I am perfectly aware of the foolishness of this course of action.

They’ve actually aged worse than Mercedes Lackey. I don’t know if it’s that Lackey’s big fetishes (the H/C and the angsty slash and the didactic liberalism) have actually retained their cultural relevance more than McCaffrey’s (the bodice-

Comments

[cerusee]

I think I'm crippled in appreciating Lackey's emphatic-if-in-many-ways-tone-deaf liberalism because I was raised in a very progressive household, a UU congregation and a generally socially and politically liberal neighborhood that had been fully racially integrated for decades. When a much more thoughtful and nuanced version of a certain social worldview is your default surrounding from early childhood, you tend to be underwhelmed by a clumsier presentation of same. I just never had that lightning bolt of emotional validation from Lackey that other people describe having had--more like a sense of "duh," coupled with, "yes, but you're oversimplifying, and god, you're corny."

[snarp]

Yeah, Lackey's appeal really only makes any sense when you consider that she was filling a vacuum for a lot of people. She does a lot of boneheaded-to-offensive stuff, and if there is a list of ways that you can be a bad writer, she has clearly carefully studied that list, and put checkmarks next to most of it, and then added a couple of her own ideas. But in the big-huge-fantasy-series-genre, the Valdemar stuff's political worldview was pretty unique ten-fifteen-twenty-whatever years ago.

(I'm kind of phrasing this carefully because I don't actually feel things have gotten much better, but then I'm also not reading much recent fantasy.)

Also, she provided angsty slash pre-internet. I suspect that that gave her a boost.

[cerusee]

You're probably right that things haven't gotten much better. I am really, really not on top of the speculative fiction scene these days, so it's pretty academic to me. In a vague and distant way, I sympathize with people's frustrations that modern fantasy and science fiction is (as I understand it) not breaking any progressive ground, and failing to keep up in some important ways. But I'm not reading the books and feeling the absence and getting frustrated by it, so I don't personally care about that. Or maybe I should say that in a world that generally frustrates me by not being progressive enough, speculative fiction not being progressive enough does not presently stand out to me.

[snarp]

This is a very sensible point of view. I just worry that if I were to emulate it, I wouldn't be able to keep in practice at Being Disappointed In Things. I guess I could always be disappointed in how people dress their children in matching outfits, or have lawns, but it just wouldn't be the same.

[cerusee]

Eh, it wasn't something I deliberately cultivated. It's just that years of gradually being worn down by disappointment have left me unable to be outraged by this sort of thing except for really egregious stuff done by people who should know better. I don't have en endless supply of emotional stamina, and I now conserve it more carefully--one bout of serious depression brought on in large part by flogging myself over things I cannot change was enough for one lifetime.