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

[meganbmoore]

Heh. Yeah. I think her historical fantasies and fairy tale books hold up a bit better as books, though.

Actually, I was kind of sad a couple years ago when I realized I'd apparently outgrown her. I mean, trying and failing is still trying, which is more than a lot go for.

I couldn't read the gay guys books because...well, they were really, really bad, IIRC, but I remember that the lesbians in the first books, and then other same sex (and IIRC, bisexual) characters later on were treated as perfectly normal. Like, she drew attention to them so you'd notice "yes, I do mean for them to be gay," but it wasn't UNUSUAL.

Now, the one whose lifemate was his horse? She did treat that one as a bit unusual.

[telophase]

What I mostly remember from the Vanyel books was that everyone spent inordinate amounts of time explaining to each other about how it was OK to be gay, and less time actually showing that, which struck me as an unbalanced way of doing that, and which could have been rewritten to be better.

Aaaaand then over a decade ago I managed to get in an argument on the internet with a man who insisted that EVERY WORD WAS PERFECT AND NOTHING SHOULD BE CHANGED because the book really helped him to cope with being a gay teen. Lesson learned: do not argue details of writing and editing with someone who is speaking from a deeply emotional and personal stance. (I am very happy that he found the right book at the right time! It doesn't mean the books couldn't have been better.)

[snarp]

She had to make room for other stuff! Like Vanyel brooding about his family, and music, and clothes, and magic horses, and his evil tutor, and etc.

I was really surprised when I reread them a while back and realized how abrupt and weird that whole romance was. His aunt shows up just a couple hours after it begins to give a speech validating it. Because his boyfriend was talking to her telepathically, about his self-esteem and identity problems, while they were still in bed together! Word-count-wise, people spend more time talking about their relationship than they do talking to each other.

[snarp]

Tamora Pierce? (Though maybe that's a little too non-challenging.) If I remember right, her Circle of Magic series had three lesbian characters. I felt they were kind of stereotypes, but they were cute books.

(I'm sure I'll think of like a million other things later, but right now I need to go to work.)

[rachelmanija]

Yes, the Circle of Magic series has several supporting lesbian characters. Later in the series, one of the leading characters comes out as lesbian. They're very sweet and gay-positive, and her writing is WAY better than Lackey's.

[lacrimawanders]

I COME TO SHIBATA LOL

Want to go to the city tomorrow? I want to try to go to that cosmetics store in Furumachi to get stickers.

See if you can figure out google maps, and tack yourself on one. I am going to drive out to Nishi.

[snarp]

Why did you make me look up the AMV Hell thing. I now kinda want to watch Berserk, and I'm sure that that's a very bad idea.

[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.