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Urban Fantasy/Paranormal Romance v. 3.0


LugaJetboyGirl

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I'm reading The Dirty Streets of Heaven by Tad Williams at the minute and it got me thinking some more about what makes Urban Fantasy. I think one important feature, at least for me, is that the city is not merely a setting but is almost a character in its own right, if that makes sense to people. It has its own personality, its own history, etc. I'm not the most well read in urban fantasy, but to me that seems to be one of the important elements.

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Well, I;ve never read either but it would depend on what the ideas are based on, and if they have any common original in myth or lit, and so on. Idea stealing, particular in SFFis just a clusterfuck to get into. Unless you pull a CC and just steal entire passages, of course :P

 

I like the idea up thread a bit about Urban Fantasy having the city as its own character. Makes sense.

 

Edit: Ha, I didn't mean to imply the city as character idea was stolen, just realized how that could be implied. I need food.

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I'm planning on reading Fire Touched later this week but Anne Bishop's Marked in Flesh also came out today and I have to read that one first.  Figures there'd be no urban fantasy I want to read for months and then two on one day!  I've loved the first three books in Bishop's The Others series so I have high hopes for this fourth one.

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4 hours ago, Mandy said:

Sorry for the multi-posting, but I just don't even know where else to discuss this...

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So... Patricia Briggs essentially just had Mercy Thompson claim the city JUST LIKE Kate Daniels did a book or two ago in Ilona Andrews' series. Ummm... WTF? This is a little bit more than simply having shape changers in both books.  I like both series of books, but out of nowhere like this? It hasn't been a discussion before- not a hint that it COULD be done, much less than it might... it seems incredibly unnecessary to the plot of the books and I'm just kind of dumbfounded at this point that it's happened.  I'm sure it's one of those things like the idea of resheathing used in Richard Morgan's Takeshi Kovacs novels that has been used in books before... 

so at what point do we call idea stealing... stealing?  What are the criteria?  It'd be pretty difficult to claim that you came up with the idea of werewolves, for example, but... this bothers me a lot.

I'm not exactly sure how it works in the Mercy Thompson series, but at least in Kate Daniels the basic idea of claiming territory having some magical component was forshadowed in an early book when everyone was freaking the hell out over a Tower showing up over some population center.

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I haven't read them, but finding out from the TvTropes page that as a werecoyote Mercy is weaker than basically everyone around her, including her love interest, isn't making me want to.

That time when I flipped through the opening of one of the more recent Mercy books and the first mention of a female werewolf is someone who supposedly hates her because the boss is banging Mercy instead of her didn't help either.  My ideal gender dynamics are a touch more progressive than those in your average outlaw motorcycle club.

Also, for a genre whose covers almost universally depict a hot young brunette in tight pants and tank top, I feel like the covers are almost egregiously bad.  I'm disregarding out and out paranormal romance, although I guess there's also the UF covers of hot chicks wearing dominatrix outfits (looking at you, Kim Harrison).

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1 hour ago, Mandy said:

I'd say they're right there in the same vein as Kim Harrison and Ilona Andrews, though I'd really like to believe the Ilona Andrews books are slightly better (have been told by those in this thread I am wrong lol).  But at least it's not the Vampire Diaries or the Black Dagger Brotherhood.

I feel like Kate Daniels in particular is above par as far as most urban fantasy goes.  Kate and Curran's relationship is pretty equal as far as UF goes, and female characters are pretty well represented among main, supporting, and redshirt tiers.  There's that idiocy about how shapeshifter cultural norms make invading boundaries and pulling romantic comedy bullshit an integral part of shapeshifter courting.  Breaking into the house of the woman you like and watching her sleep is Twilight levels of creepy, even if stealing her snack food while doing so takes some of the edge off.

Kate Daniels is no Pax Arcana  though.  Sig is awesome.

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8 hours ago, Mars447 said:

I feel like Kate Daniels in particular is above par as far as most urban fantasy goes.  Kate and Curran's relationship is pretty equal as far as UF goes, and female characters are pretty well represented among main, supporting, and redshirt tiers.  There's that idiocy about how shapeshifter cultural norms make invading boundaries and pulling romantic comedy bullshit an integral part of shapeshifter courting.  Breaking into the house of the woman you like and watching her sleep is Twilight levels of creepy, even if stealing her snack food while doing so takes some of the edge off.

Kate Daniels is no Pax Arcana  though.  Sig is awesome.

I would say Kate Daniels is above par. The home invasion you mentioned cuts both ways, so while strange, it is equal

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1 hour ago, Andorion said:

I would say Kate Daniels is above par. The home invasion you mentioned cuts both ways, so while strange, it is equal

Yeah, but subjectively I feel like a big guy breaking into some woman's home just to watch her sleep to be much worse and more violating than that woman breaking into the guy's castle and wrecking his weight bench.  The latter is wacky (criminal charge incurring) hijinks, the former is genuinely creepy Twilight BS.

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1 hour ago, Mars447 said:

Yeah, but subjectively I feel like a big guy breaking into some woman's home just to watch her sleep to be much worse and more violating than that woman breaking into the guy's castle and wrecking his weight bench.  The latter is wacky (criminal charge incurring) hijinks, the former is genuinely creepy Twilight BS.

Except in case of shapeshifters gender does not really equate to physical prowess. A female shapeshifter in warrior form is probably just as deadly (Andrea, Aunt B ) and in some cases more deadly. A lot of the normal gender dynamics and behavioural rules don't hold true in the universe. 

Also this issue is tackled in a side plot.

 

Potential Spoilers (I don't remember which book)


 

Spoiler

 

The wolves make Kate judge a case where a male shapeshifter had broken into a female's room when she had no interest in him and she shot him multiple times. Kate asked the male why she should not have him executed. 


 

 

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Just read the prequel Dorina Barsarab short story, Zombie Bite.  It's pretty good. Dory and Kit meet for the first time and beat the ever loving shit out of each other all over New Orleans.  Dory actually comes off as more of a badass here than she does in some of her books.

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On 10/03/2016 at 6:59 PM, Mars447 said:

I feel like Kate Daniels in particular is above par as far as most urban fantasy goes.  Kate and Curran's relationship is pretty equal as far as UF goes, and female characters are pretty well represented among main, supporting, and redshirt tiers.  There's that idiocy about how shapeshifter cultural norms make invading boundaries and pulling romantic comedy bullshit an integral part of shapeshifter courting.  Breaking into the house of the woman you like and watching her sleep is Twilight levels of creepy, even if stealing her snack food while doing so takes some of the edge off.

Kate Daniels is no Pax Arcana  though.  Sig is awesome.

The main problems with Kate Daniels is that it is both extremely heteronormative and that it has some pretty dull internalised sexism. It's kinda...second wave feminist in that regard? Like, women are just as kick-ass as the men, they have to be just as tough, or tougher, they never cry or show much of any softer emotion (not that the dudes do either, cos their version of masculinity does not allow it). While also totally denigrating anything feminine and offending male characters with comparing them to women.

I can live with the first part, since the deviations from that norm is almost useless to try and find cos they are rarer than pigshit, but the second... you know, it's pretty simple stuff. It just jars when you have a female character using stuff like "cry like a girl" to bring a male character down. Like yeah, female character just made herself a unique snowflake woman, belittled her entire gender and also made a totally useless sexist remark. Whoop-tee-doo.

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3 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

The main problems with Kate Daniels is that it is both extremely heteronormative and that it has some pretty dull internalised sexism. It's kinda...second wave feminist in that regard? Like, women are just as kick-ass as the men, they have to be just as tough, or tougher, they never cry or show much of any softer emotion (not that the dudes do either, cos their version of masculinity does not allow it). While also totally denigrating anything feminine and offending male characters with comparing them to women.

I can live with the first part, since the deviations from that norm is almost useless to try and find cos they are rarer than pigshit, but the second... you know, it's pretty simple stuff. It just jars when you have a female character using stuff like "cry like a girl" to bring a male character down. Like yeah, female character just made herself a unique snowflake woman, belittled her entire gender and also made a totally useless sexist remark. Whoop-tee-doo.

The first trope - kickass female does make for extremely entertaining reads though (Kate stabbing people with Slayer is one of the main reasons I love these books)

As for the second one, I can't of the top of my head think of an example of this happening. 

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4 hours ago, Lyanna Stark said:

The main problems with Kate Daniels is that it is both extremely heteronormative and that it has some pretty dull internalised sexism. It's kinda...second wave feminist in that regard? Like, women are just as kick-ass as the men, they have to be just as tough, or tougher, they never cry or show much of any softer emotion (not that the dudes do either, cos their version of masculinity does not allow it). While also totally denigrating anything feminine and offending male characters with comparing them to women.

I can live with the first part, since the deviations from that norm is almost useless to try and find cos they are rarer than pigshit, but the second... you know, it's pretty simple stuff. It just jars when you have a female character using stuff like "cry like a girl" to bring a male character down. Like yeah, female character just made herself a unique snowflake woman, belittled her entire gender and also made a totally useless sexist remark. Whoop-tee-doo.

46 minutes ago, Darth Richard II said:

But she just gave you an example of it happening...

I Control+Fed through all of my ebook copies of the series, and I can find precisely zero examples of the phrase "like a girl" in any of them.  So, it's not actually an example.

Anyways, I prefer kickass chicks who can beat everyone up to weak female characters who need to rely on the men in their lives to get them out of trouble.  Am I sexist?

 

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On 12/03/2016 at 3:49 AM, Mars447 said:

Anyways, I prefer kickass chicks who can beat everyone up to weak female characters who need to rely on the men in their lives to get them out of trouble.  Am I sexist?

 

Way too complicated a question to ask like that without giving you a ten page essay on how our culture devalues femininity. If you are interested for real and not just asking it as a rhetorical question, then read "Whipping Girl" by Serano. It lays it out clearly.

4 hours ago, Mandy said:

I'd like to hear a specific example of the kind of internalized sexism mentioned, because I can't think of one either and I've read the series probably 3-4 times, fully. If I do another reread I will be on the hunt and report what I find!! However, I am sensitive to that kind of thing, so I'm surprised it's mentioned. I either glossed over it or didn't see it. I think I've seen this kind of internalized sexism in the Mercy Thompson novels, however.

Kate Daniels are definitely not among the worse examples in the genre by far, also agreed on Mercy Thompson (from what I have read of it, which is not a lot since I cba with it).

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