I mean, yeah, it's the slut-shamey rape-culture stuff that I had in mind, not just "there is sex-related stuff in these books." But for whatever reason knowing that a conversation was had between a parent and child and this is the conclusion they agreed on adds an extra frisson of "ick" to the whole thing, to me.
Gotcha. The mom, PC Cast, apparently writes a lot of material that the daughter then re-words because "it sounds like a middle-aged librarian", and I read an interesting review that suggested that some of the judgy parts of Zoey's internal narrative - not just about sex, but also about drinking, drugs, swearing, etc - sound like a Mom Comment turned into passable teen-speak by an adult daughter who bought into her Mom's Comments.
they're just.........not good books, at all, i remember there being something redeeming but i also dont remember what it was exactly meaning that it. probably wasn't that redeeming fdslkjfdls
I remember being in my FUCK CHRISTIANITY FUCK GOD WICCA GOOD!!! phase when I first picked them up so it was Super Empowering to have a book that was also like YEAH CHRISTIANS ARE DUMB YEAH!!! And then I read further and realized that a) that was a stupid metric to judge a book by and b) for a staunchly anti-conservative christian trapping, it sure espoused a lot of christian conservative rhetoric but filtered through a Lady Goddess Good overlay. edit: Also, yknow, vampires and the MC being the Most Special Girl Ever which was a lot of my taste as a teen. I won't even pretend like that wasn't half the appeal for me.
Other problem with Sword of Truth; one of the Evil Overlords is named Panis Rahl. Das Sporking thinks he was trying to invoke "panic", but that's, er, not what most people are going to see there.
you reeeeeally don't know what shit was like in the 80's, do you? chances are if she'd told anyone they would've said it was romantic and tried to help him Get The Girl. if she told her work to stop accepting calls, she'd have been punished for bringing personal drama into the workplace. no one took stalking or harassment seriously, and if anything went wrong it was the woman's fault.
Honestly, I can state that this was true as recently as a decade ago. I was stalked for years by a creep who was sexually and romantically obsessed with me, and when my mom reported the incident to the police (she did it for me because I was only 16 at the time) they basically laughed her off and blamed her for "not keeping a close enough eye on (my) internet activities" (it was cyberstalking from a former friend that had escalated into him sending creepy letters and calling my house). So unfortunately, that kind of thing has changed very little, at least as recently as ten years ago.
There's "not talk to the police" and there's "not warn your friends in case he moves on to them, nor mention it to your fiance who has given you no reason to believe he wouldn't be sympathetic, especially since the guy has openly threatened kidnapping". I have a family member who was stalked in the 80s and I know the cops didn't do anything, but she did tell her family about it. When I said "didn't tell anyone" I meant ANYONE. ETA: I'm not trying to say any efforts to make the guy go away would actually work, but it's very frustrating when the character doesn't do anything at all to try. I feel that takes away a lot of the possible tension.
fUCK I'M ONLY ON 7 *fake edit* wait it's only 12 thank fuck I've gotten up to the part where they go to Scotland btw and their attempts at writing Scots are a combination of horror and hilarity - their AAVE is brilliant by comparison. (Their AAVE is Not Great.) I'm not a native speaker, but between studying it out of nerdy passion in my own time, living there for a year, and continuing to occasionally read it, I think I have a decent enough grasp to say how awful this is: *ahem* should be: "she isnae conceirned wi yous weans even if it's a matter o life an death." ("Wains" is also technically correct, but doesn't seem quite right in this sentence.) Here are some of my further suggestions: becomes: "Ur ye stupit or jis aff yer heid? Ye huvnae permission tae enter [the island]." "Ye'v bin misinformed, Warrior. Ye huvnae rights at aw here." "Aye, but a wisnae ever that young." Some of the things I want to "fix" are probably regional spellings rather than inaccuracies, like "doesna" versus "disnae", but the entire thing is terrible anyway, so *shrugs* Basically, it looks like the authors wrote things in the popular conception of Ye Olde English (i.e. Early Modern English filtered through the Reinaissance Faire) and then asked a Scottish person for a few words to stir through; reading this, I can pretty much hear in my head what they imagine Scottish accents sound like, which is sad because they thank their Scottish friends in the acknowledgements for all their help with Celtic language stuff - which presumably means they did talk to each other a lot, giving the Casts plenty of time to get used to it. They also go on to say that any errors are their own fault, which their friends must be relieved to hear, because Google fucking Translate does better than this and it doesn't even have Scots leid, just Scottish Gaelic. Which the Casts also butcher. Oh, and to top it all off, the chapter ends with the Scottish Vampyre Warrior telling the American teenage boy with a distant clan affiliation that he needs to become A Shaman so he can save the soul of his ~one quarter Cherokee~ Wiccan High Priestess. So.
i mean i hate that but i hate when writers do that in general once it gets more invasive than, say, some extra apostrophes its baffling that "normal" american american or british accents are just written as normal but any deviation from that norm is just like, ah yes, time to fuck shit up
like.....when introducing a character drop a line about a strong scottish accent, if it's really thick make a point to note that the mc might have issues understanding it. please dont make me suffer through godawful spelled-like-its-said
This always really bothers me because the people who spell things this way in real life have like. Actual rules and conventions to how they spell and how they speak. Some of this varies from region to region of course because that's just how language works. And even more so if you've not a big fancy academic system and government going 'THIS IS THE ONLY PRESCRIBED WAY OF SPELLING SHIT EVER'. And a lot of the shit I see seems like it's attempting to be Scots but the issues is that Scots leid is a leid. It's a language. It has rules. If you are going to write in Scots, please for the love of gods learn Scots properly. There are rules and the rules aren't being given proper care to because fuck the Scottish I guess. And they just get to go and get away with it and it not being accurate when there are people who are forced to go through invasive, bigoted fucking 'speech therapy'. Like fuck this shit can even end up contributing to language death. There's features in Hiberno-English that don't get used as much in some areas because of how ubiquitous they are with Stage Irish and bigoted stereotypes of the Irish because someone thought it was funny or whatever to be SUPER DUPER IRISH (while usually fucking up on the rules). It seems like a little thing but little things pile up.
As Aon pointed out, Scots is different from just "a Scottish accent"; it's as old as English and has its own writing conventions. To my knowledge, "yie" for "ye" is not one of them, so falls under "godawful spelled-like-it's-said", but things like "wumman" don't - that is actually how you spell the Scots word for "woman". There are variations in spelling (e.g. wean/wain mentioned above) as well as region, but there is a legit orthography. And re: apostrophes in particular, if someone is speaking Scots, it may very well be inappropriate to include an apostrophe. The Scots word "wi" is not a shortened version of "with" any more than the English word "have" is a shortened version of the German "haben". If they are speaking straight-up English with a Scottish accent, then no, there's no need to spell it out after you first mention it, even if they do occasionally drop in a Scots word.
There's a really common tendency to assume two mutually intelligible languages are actually the same, and that the one with less cultural clout is a bastardized dialect of the "real" language. The most obvious example aside from Scots is every single Italic language that isn't Italian.
This also goes for the Casts' attempts at AAVE. I know less about AAVE grammar than Scots, but I can pinpoint a specific weakness in their understanding of the habitual be, and then also this one time where they seemed to substitute mock-AAVE for mock-Scots, which was just awful.
