Fantasy Has Cooties. MAN Cooties.

[krylyr]

At least, according to this NY Times review of "A Game of Thrones." Because nobody in her book club demands that they read "The Hobbit" instead of something by Lorrie Moore. (Who?) Apparently, Bellafante needs to join a different book club? Preferably one with bogwitch64 or in it?

Annalee Newitz at io9 has what I assume is a brilliant takedown (it has

Comments

[ann_leckie]

You know what I want to say, don't you? Yeah, I bet you do. I read about this yesterday and decided there were no words.

[krylyr]

Ummmmmmm. I'm going to guess what you thought was along the lines of wanting an proportionate amount of zombies and dinosaurs? Oh, wait. LESBIANS!

[csecooney]

I saw mariness's link to this this morning and went bonkers on Facebook about it. What a fine thread. The gist is, all us girly fans of the Martin books (and probably TV series) are going to dress up in armor and ride out like Valkyries against the New York Times.

[krylyr]

May I be your squire?

[malkingrey]

Wow. That's clearly got to be an instance of criticism from outside the genre, since it's well known within the genre that fantasy is the girly subgenre that's dragging down proper, manly hard sf.

And as for female viewers liking or not liking muscular leading men doing their muscular thing . . . I'm reminded, for some reason, of how apparently the Hollywood prediction machine thought that the Clark Gable version of Mutiny on the Bounty was going to be mainly a guys' picture, only to be surprised when it turned into one of the Big Date Movies of its year. For some reason, they had failed to account for the appeal of Clark Gable in a well-cut Royal Navy uniform, including the nice tight breeches. (And later in the film, he takes off his shirt. Considering that this was well before the advent of the Nautilus machine and the expectation that any male star planning to bare his torso should spend a lot of quality time thereon, Mr. Gable stripped extremely well.)†

†Unlike, say, Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia, who turned out to be

[krylyr]

I guess being outside the genre you mgight not equate Urban Fantasy with Epic Fantasy? Because, surely she knows women who read Charlainne Harris or Kim Harrison?

We'll save MZB and JK Rowling for the follow-up.

[rose_lemberg]

Really? Those female readers of this LJ, I would love to hear from you in the comments.
I read and write epic fantasy, even though Martin is not my favorite (I lost interest at some point). This article would make me angrier if it wasn't so ridiculous. But it is, so I'm going to chop it with my Sword of Ignore +5.

[krylyr]

It wouldn't have bothered me as much (I think) if she'd said, eh. I don't like it because it's too violent or too grim or whatever other valid reason. But yeah, the review's premise seems staggeringly ridiculous.

[rose_lemberg]

It has the irrefutable logic of "I don't like it"+"I'm a girl"="no girls would like this!" :D What's much more annoying is that the NYT printed this.

[sartorias]

I love some epic fantasy. (Game of Thrones isn't one I love.)

[krylyr]

I thought of you when I typed this whole thing up :)

I'm not sure whether I love Games of Throne or not yet, and it's totally valid for people not to like it. But lumping epic fantasy as something girls can't like just really, really annoyed me.

[sartorias]

I didn't look at the article (it's too hot to get my blood pressure up) but does it assume there are no female writers of epic fantasy as well as no female readers?

:le sigh:

GRRM is a fine writer, I just don't like that particular series.

[krylyr]

No, she didn't state that. I doubt she even thought very hard about that. But that assumption seems (to me, at least) to be buried between the lines.