Note: I am a Twilight fan and I have not read any of House of Night, but from the sound of it, it is way, way, way worse than Twilight. Way worse. Like incredibly worse. Twilight has problems; I don't agree that the relationship is abusive because abusive men don't crack and give you your way the way Edward does when Bella makes it clear she is not going to do the thing he wants her to do; he's working off early 20th century upbringing and a brain that's been marinated in 17 year old hormones for a century, but that doesn't mean what he does is okay. But slut shaming and a lot of this other stuff is not present. (Yes, Edward balks at premarital sex because he thinks it's wrong; but Bella comes close to being unpleasantly coercive about trying to get him to do it as well; it doesn't read to me as slut-shaming, it reads to me as Bella Learn 2 Boundaries PLZ.)
They weren't all explicitly described and she was at least equal-opportunity (there were predatory women and male victims, not just a constant parade of sexual violence against women), but yeah, it's... a trend in her writing. :::||| (Could totally bring this back to complaining about The Sword of Truth again, BTW.)
I've seen more of HoN than of Twilight, but my impression is definitely that HoN is a lot worse. My impression is that Twilight knows what the story is and how to tell it, while a pretty significant amount of HoN's word count consists of the author smugly patting herself on the back instead of anything HAPPENING.
I'm not really sure what there is to complain about since it's easy to avoid. I would rather read Ford x Reader than read a bad Ford/OC fic. I write Ford/OC and I'm generally told Valiska is one of the good ones, and Adeline Marks is OK too, but I wish the Koko Sweet girl would just write Ford x Reader because I can't fucking see Ford acknowledging that Koko Sweet exists, let alone marrying her. Although it is super weird when "you" do something you would never do. In X Reader fics, it's actually a given that the you is you, though, it's not like Homestuck. They're marked CharacterName X Reader. Often they're marked X Reader (Female) or X Reader (Male) or X Reader (Gender left Indeterminate)... Bonus points for doing it in a culture that primarily worships a Goddess. I thought long and hard about whether or not Ford would know that word because he uses it all the fuck over WT, and eventually decided that Mabel must have told him about it, but at least he did have a 13 year old girl in his life to have learnt it from... See also my stepmother cracking up at my dad when I mentioned having a girlfriend and he expressed surprise... Twilight also, while it contains some serious Native American representation fail, has a neat background story that I really want to see resolved where the white decadent asshole European vampires think they can tell everyone else what to do because they are super powerful and it takes a serious multicultural alliance just to defeat them once. I want those Volturi fuckers brought down.
UGHHHH LACKEY......... another author who gets the Scathing Voice when i see them on the shelves.... conveniently, she is very close to goodkind, so i can be efficient about my scorn and loathing
It sucks, because Lackey was definitely Babies First Gay Fantasy for me (not counting the shit in the Beauty series by Anne Rice) but a lot of her Valdemar books haven't aged well.
So yeah, bringing in non-canon rape just for extra angst annoys me. Like, I like me a good noncon as much as any perv, but put some more story to it or some more porn to it, either way. I have standards for rape, dammit.
Yyyyeah, I'd forgotten about how much of that was in her books. And I was never entirely happy with how she dealt with Talia's estrangement from her birth family. I mean sure, it makes sense that Sensholding would continue to insist that they have no daughter Talia; they've gone that far, going back would just make it look like they're trying to ride her coattails (and Holder pride implies that they'd rather die than be seen to do that). But when she goes back to visit her childhood friend, and the friend is explicitly mentioned as having been making signs to ward off evil every time she thought Talia wasn't looking? That's...it felt wrong, honestly. Because this is someone who was said to be Talia's best friend, and now she's just a clone of Talia's mom who can't see that Talia's not what they were told about Heralds growing up. (It honestly sort of baffles me that the Holders wouldn't tell kids the truth about Heralds, too. I mean, no one knows how the Companions pick, but I could pretty easily spin that if I wanted to, so I don't see how any adults in the Holder communities couldn't. It's not like the Companions are generally taking away the kids they'd want to keep; they're taking the ones who care a little too much about what's outside the walls and who don't quite fit right in the community despite their best efforts.) How awful Talia's brother and the rest of her family were was...it also sat wrong with me? Not because Talia wasn't absolutely right to leave that place as soon as she could. But because Talia would've been just as right to leave even if they had been less awful. And because even as a kid, it felt weird that there wasn't any more subtleness about it - the bad guys were always Very Very Bad, Look At Them Kicking Puppies, Isn't That Terrible levels of bad and evil. (I think Mercedes Lackey also wrote that Sierra Steel series about elves racing cars and helping abused kids, and there's an awful lot of "if you're being abused, it must be sexual somehow too" going on in there too. Including one instance of underaged prostitutes that I recall, where the kid ran away from home because her parents banned all fantasy and at the end of it, the hero drives by their house (where she's been returned to) and sees a unicorn sun-catcher in the window and goes "ah, everything's better now, she'll be fine". When...no? They're probably not actually better? You never went in and asked if they're letting her read fantasy books, or play video games or do anything they view as 'frivolous'? You're literally judging this based on something you can see from the street, which is exactly what the parents would want you to do? Just...nnngh. I liked them a lot as a kid! I assume mainly because I didn't have a whole lot else that was really good.)
Spoiler: Personal? Idk It seems im in the minority here, but i used to read quite a lot of these kinds of fics when i was younger because it was nice to see someone getting comforted and told it was not their fault and even occasionally being overly babied when i couldnt say anything about my own experiences irl. This isnt really relevent to the convo and i dont really think this trope is okay and should be written more, im just feeling defensive and wanted to say something
Lately, when I see an author doing that, this just plays in my head automatically. (Linking for those specific ten seconds, not the whole video.) My favorite is when fanfic authors make the canon villains into rapists just because. Because they're already bad guys, so obviously it follows that they would be rapists. You don't even need to consider whether it would be in-character for the specific villain in question! (I actually used to try and keep track of the most ridiculous choices for Fanfic Rapist™. Pretty sure Luca Blight still tops the list.)
See also: when there's other characters right there who totally would do the thing but the author picks the least appropriate of all available options instead. #yes I am still ??? about that one weird dubcon fic
I'm... Going to have to really strongly disagree with the bolded. Especially in relationships of mutual abuse (which I would argue Twilight is to some degree, for reasons including your talk about Bella's coercive sex thing here), abusers can know how to pick their battles. It's also not not an abusive relationship if someone belittles you and treats you as a child, lets you do what you want, and then uses the consequences of you doing that as an excuse to further control you, which the Cullens in general and Edward in specific do to Bella a lot prior to her vampenating. (See Tangled for another example of that; Gothel frames her appearance upon finding Rapunzel outside the tower as a rescue and uses that situation to institute new rules and a new Way Things Are that tightens down her control.)
Let's also not forget the bit where Edward literally takes the engine out of Bella's truck, which cuts off her ability to do the thing she was considering (that is: going to go see Jacob, his hypothetical romantic rival). It also prevents her from doing pretty much anything else that requires leaving the house; she's in a rural area in the rainiest part of the country. Walking isn't actually terribly viable for getting around in those areas; the distances involved are just too big. There's a reason why Bella's given a truck to get to school with at all, and it's not because her dad wants to give her some social cred - it's because the alternative is that he drops her off in his car every day, and he drives a police cruiser (and might not be interested in working to her schedule).
