Things in books that make you angry.

[L’Age d’or]

Close friends treating each other as stupid bums.

[Little Valkyrie]

This is right up there with Arbitrary Evil. Antagonists who are apparently evil just for the sake of being evil. No real motivation behind it like lust for wealth, power or glory, they're just Evil. Killing babies, stealing dogs and raping bibles just for the hell of it.

I just finished a book where, when I went and looked at the author's blog, she admitted that she made one of the main antagonists deliberately 2-D evil, she doesn't know her motivations or backstory or anything, nope, just evil. (The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, if you're curious.) I wanted to reply "It shows."

I haven't read Mercedes Lackey in a long time but I remember a lot of villainous rapists. Want to show that someone's evil? Rape is the best shorthand! I'm tired of reading things with random rape in them just because it's tiresome, unless the author is going for that full-on Crapsack World treatment. Those are tolerable in small doses.

[Cantabile]

True. If one is only looking for relaxation and entertainment, then it seems fine to avoid things that bother the person emotionally. However, if that choice is reflective of an overall world view, rather than simply using reading as escapism, then that's no good. Blinding oneself to the fucked up things in life might make it easier to live for you, but for the people those things happen to, life is still shit. With awareness at least one can try to change those fucked up things, even if the best they can do is to influence just a few people about it.

[jurble]

Dunno, Daniel Abraham (in those books what with the poets and stuff) has characters who're probably rapists as good-ish characters, like the General dude who was in love with the Emperor's wife, he and his men raped and pillaged while with the Galts, but he wasn't ever presented as a bad man, nor were his soldiers.

[Lord O' Bones]

if that choice is reflective of an overall world view, rather than simply using reading as escapism, then that's no good. Blinding oneself to the fucked up things in life might make it easier to live for you, but for the people those things happen to, life is still shit. With awareness at least one can try to change those fucked up things, even if the best they can do is to influence just a few people about it.

Sure. But why would anyone assume that correlation just because someone dislikes books with rape in them? As Poobs seemed to do to trio.

Ya know Poobah, this whole derailment could have been avoided had you merely prefaced with "in my opinion" and not quoted trio. ;)

[Little Valkyrie]

Dunno, Daniel Abraham (in those books what with the poets and stuff) has characters who're probably rapists as good-ish characters, like the General dude who was in love with the Emperor's wife, he and his men raped and pillaged while with the Galts, but he wasn't ever presented as a bad man, nor were his soldiers.

I can't speak for anyone else, but as a female reader there's a difference between "This book has characters who probably did some raping but it's not really focused on in the text, we don't see it happen, it's mentioned" and "Here's a nice big long graphically-described rape scene! Let me hammer it home for you!" The latter can be very effective, but it's also easy to do very badly.

[Dr Adder]

Ex politicians publishing self serving autobiographies ruining the remaining good things of their legacies, and proving once and for all that their detractors were right.

John Howard really was a miserable toad.

[MinDonner]

I can't speak for anyone else, but as a female reader there's a difference between "This book has characters who probably did some raping but it's not really focused on in the text, we don't see it happen, it's mentioned" and "Here's a nice big long graphically-described rape scene! Let me hammer it home for you!" The latter can be very effective, but it's also easy to do very badly.

We did have a thread about this a few months back. Usually the Rape Scene can serve one (or more) of a number of purposes:

- A shorthand for how eeevil the bad guys are

- Some Peril for the Heroine to be in

-- this can take the form of Almost-Rape if the heroine is particularly good and pure and not allowed to screw anyone apart from the hero

-- OR it can be a case of "Look how gritty my book is!"

- A cheap excuse for either the heroine or, more usually, the hero, to take bloody revenge on the perpetrator

- Last but definitely not least, the cause for a "sex" scene that you just know was typed one-handed, the author effectively going "of course rape is bad mmkay, but OMG look what he's doing to her now!!"

Very rarely is it done well, but that's not exactly surprising, given society's weird and conflicted view of rape in general. But that's a whole other story.

/threadjack, sorry

Regarding the OP, I hate lazy character-motivators, particularly the one where the bad guy has the good guy injected with some kind of poison to which only he has the antidote!, rather than coming up with a proper reason for your Good Character to do Bad Things.

Oh, and whiny emo heroes. Yeah Fitz, I'm looking at you.

[Sariel]

Protagonists that are presented as being fairly or even exceptionally intelligent yet again and again make moronic choices seemingly purely to move the plot forwards.

[Artas]

Ex politicians publishing self serving autobiographies ruining the remaining good things of their legacies, and proving once and for all that their detractors were right.

For a minute there, I thought you were talking about Tony Blair.

[Confalume]

Bullets zinging everywhere except where they're meant to go. Come on bad guys learn to shoot!!

[trio]

A lot of "Serious Literature" has rape in it. Art should challenge you and make you feel uncomfortable. The world if FUCKED UP and just burying your head in the sand and dreaming happy dreams isn't going to make it better.

:lmao:

Oh guys, what on earth would we do without posters to tell us how we should read books???

Brilliant! *wipes tear*

[Martin Silenus]

It's like the epic "Rape of Tuon" shitstorm from the ghost of westeros.org's past never ended up in this bitch... that last bit will be misconstrued, won't it?

[Poobah]

:lmao:

Oh guys, what on earth would we do without posters to tell us how we should read books???

Brilliant! *wipes tear*

Well pardon me for your ignorance.

[Max the Mostly Mediocre]

The world is FUCKED UP and just burying your head in the sand and dreaming happy dreams isn't going to make it better.

Neither will reading ASOIAF.

Or, I mean, it will in the sense that you'll be deriving enjoyment from the series for x hours, but beyond that...

[Maia]

Chosen ones, grossly inept villains, whiny reluctant heroes/leaders who despite constant attempts to escape from the story get heaped with ever more powerful abilities and ever greater responsibilities; prophecies that are always 100% true, just misunderstood; wildly inconsistent settings, largely sub-par depiction of heroines and female characters in general.

Heh, one wonders why I am fantasy fan :rolleyes:.

[AquariumDrinker]

A lot of "Serious Literature" has rape in it. Art should challenge you and make you feel uncomfortable. The world is FUCKED UP and just burying your head in the sand and dreaming happy dreams isn't going to make it better.

lol

[Poobah]

Sure.

If I was a little overly simplistic in my first post, well, I don't always have the time to write a wall of text. And just "you're wrong" is a bit more impolite than a three sentence rebuttal, even if only marginally. If people can't cope with a simple statement that, shockingly, rape is featured in 'serious literature' - and by the way try reading something simple into that very simple sentence instead of making a dumb comment... like oh I dunno maybe that if something is dealt with in what the mainstream accepts as 'serious literature'* as well as this crazy 'fantasy' stuff then maybe it isn't something that can be discarded so easily as some of the other, far more trivial examples of 'things in books that make you angry' - then, well I thought this board had a slightly higher IQ to be honest.

*Though I would contend that SF and 'genre fiction' in general is just as valid as literature as anything that the mainstream and critical community arbitrarily decide to judge as capitol L Literature.

My point is that saying - and I paraphrase but this is pretty much the gist of what I read from trio's post - 'I only read books for enjoyment and I will never read a book with rape in it, [unsaid but implied given the thread in which this is posted: books with rape in them make me angry]' is, well... pretty indicative of a very unproductive worldview at best. One cannot simply throw 'depictions of rape in fiction' on the same pile as 'arbitrarily evil overlords''retcons' and 'boring/samey magic systems' because that's just absurd. It's also hypocritical in the extreme if one refuses to deal with rape but is totally happy to deal with the huge bodycounts in traditional epic fantasy - mass slaughter is ok and doesn't detract from your happy escapist enjoyment, but you're squeamish about rape? Guess it's lucky that everyone killed in the villages the orcs/evil minions raze to the ground are killed quickly and cleanly then...

The over romanticised and almost entirely sanitised portrayal of war you often get in generic epic fantasy is just... macabre? Grotesque even? At least when it is pushed as the only way to portray war in literature since you've thrown the other sort on the 'hate' pile. That is of course that presuming you aren't a hypocrite you've also thrown realistic depictions of violence out of the window along with rape. Sure let's have an Epic Battle with scores of honourable knights charging and all sorts of epicness, it'll be so glorious and wonderful - "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori" - right? Yeah I'm sure.

If you reject all literature that deals with real world problems and issues and elevate only escapist 'pure entertainment' over all else then I don't think literature can really define itself as an art any more. I certainly think that art can exist simply for art's sake. I definitely don't think that everything should have a deeper meaning and agree that a novel can be written simply to entertain and indeed that a hamburger has just as much of a place in cuisine as some esoteric dish from a Michelin Starred restaurant. But, to extend the metaphor, if you just eat hamburgers all day, well... I had a pretty provocative statement here but I find myself flinching from making it because I think it likely that I'll just get trolled as indeed I have been already and I just cannot be bothered. Suffice to say that I think that eating hamburgers, metaphorical or otherwise, is... not good for you, or society as a whole.

I really can't believe how many trolls have come out in this thread to support the 'books should only be escapist entertainment' flag that trio has raised though, I will say that.

Rape can certainly be done badly, and done badly in a number of ways and indeed has been especially in the fantasy genre, but also in other non-genre novels too. The example trio used as a strawman ("Oh and apparently all a woman needs to recover from the trauma of rape is A Good Man To Have Tender Sex with. See honey? Now you're all better!") for all depictions of rape in literature is an example of it done very very wrong and is certainly worthy of extremely harsh criticism, for instance. But to denounce any and all depictions of a such a serious, real and traumatic issue?

And now, for something completely different. Things in books that make me angry:

-Overt politicisation in a supposedly non-political work by the author. Don't try and smuggle your retarded politics on to my shelf in what will soon become obvious as very light camouflage. Especially don't write a fucking character to be your mouthpiece. No, you aren't writing a seminal political/philosophical work, sorry, and your pretensions to grandeur only serve to amuse us.

-Authorial fiat overriding common sense and consequence. Another huge one for me, possibly the biggest of them all. Any time where something suspension-of-disbeliefingly unbe-fucking-lievable happens because whoops I dunno how to write myself out of this corner. Characters acting wrongly because a situation demands it for the sake of the story - that secondary cast member who is usually pretty damn good at his job is suddenly an incompetent to make the hero look good, someone who normally would not mentioning something critical, anything like that. Basically bad writing, lazy writing: the author having to force something that doesn't make sense and breaks internal consistency.

I can put up with a lot of stuff like deus ex machina, prophecy, resurrection, evil overlords... all those standard tropes of the epic fantasy that come up time and again really if the writing is good and there is some sort of internal consistency. But once the verisimilitude is broken then the rest of it starts to show. This is why I'm ok with a lot of the problems Wheel of Time has... I mean I've never been one who knows or cares about trade routes and all that and I've seen it criticised in various ways because of that stuff, but in general the world has that feeling of truthfulness. Jordan has considered logical extensions of the concepts he introduces (and has cleverly written deus ex machina into the fabric of his world - cheeky but I can roll with that) so that even when shit seems STUPID it also seems internally consistent and makes sense within the setting. Sidenote : just using WoT as an example, if someone wants to argue about this quote it into the ToM thread or the derailed EotW thread if you must. The one jarring thing for me in WoT is the absolute goddamn lack of communication, which various people have described as a major theme, but I think this is way too overt and its blinding obviousness even to the casual reader is pretty bad and makes it the worst handled of the many concepts addressed in WoT, and maybe its most major flaw.

[Ski the Swift]

Sure.

And that's where you lost me. FFS man it's not even 9am yet!

[Wras]

We did have a thread about this a few months back. Usually the Rape Scene can serve one (or more) of a number of purposes:

Is it bad that I hunted down and read all 19 pages of that thread? :leaving:

Anyway, I'd like to add prologues that take a very long time. When I read 'prologue' my mind immediately goes into a 'let's get this over with' set, so when it drags on, you know, just call it Chapter 1. Probably a minor grievance but even if your prologue is very detached from the rest of the story, it's still where you're starting it.