considering how much fanfic contains both 1) no plot only crying and hugs, and 2) literal penises in great an gooey detail, i think that interpretation needs to take a long look at itself.
The big issue I personally tend to see a lot of, on Tumblr at least, isn’t just “plot is unfeminist,” although that’s definitely a big part of it—I’ve seen a depressing number of people people acting like basically any real conflict is (insert bigotry du jour here). I’d argue that it’s even worse with regards to complex characterization, and the whole “protags must be Good and Pure and villains cannot have a single sympathetic trait” bullshit I see so often (lookin’ at you, SU Criticals (TM)), but I’m also more of a character person than a plot person in terms of why I enjoy media (and personally believe that well-rounded characters can make a mediocre plot interesting, but that vice-versa is wayyyy less effective, but that’s 100% just my personal feelings vis a vis why I like things, so y’know), so I’m definitely a bit biased. :P I’m just sick of the attitude that Conflict And Characterization Are ~*Bad*~, since they’re kind of what make a story interesting...
yeah, that stuff is a big part of why my current big original project has the Actual Villain as a protagonist.
I think some people consider 'this book engages and is liked by women' or 'this book was written by a woman' to be the same thing as 'this book, or its fans, are feminist'. which is not true, but sounds like it should be true, and therefore a very easy mistake. women liking things for their own reasons can definitely be feminism, and so can women creating things! that doesn't remotely make the book itself feminist, in any way. see also: the entirely of the Black Jewels series. broke: crying and penises are polar opposites woke: queer the crying/penises binary bespoke: weepingcock is queer culture
I'm a plot person and I think you're right. Most of that sort of wank is centered on characters (and especially blaming and demonizing them), and the bad plotting is mostly a result of the bad characterization. When the protagonists are required to be Good And Pure in all respects, and anyone who is not Good And Pure must be 100% Evilbad, that automatically restricts all interactions between characters to either happy fluff where everyone agrees on everything and get along with each other or Good Guys Fight Evil People. Both of which are okay things for stories to be, but there's a million other kinds of story out there and dismissing all of them out of hand as both bad writing and morally wrong because they contain characters who do not fall into categories a) "completely agrees with you about every single thing" or b) "the incarnation of all evil" does not tend to result in either good criticism or good writing.
Earlier in the thread we had a discussion about how gay male writers end up producing misogynistic descriptions identical to straight male writers', and I found this line which I think is relevant:
Personally, I wonder if there’s overlap happening between “the main character has no apparent agency” and “there’s no plot”. I think it would be really easy to specifically make choices with plot that weaken the story and also don’t allow the characters to clearly exercise agency. One of the characters I can think of with the most remarkable inability to affect his surroundings is the patient on House who had locked-in syndrome. He was conscious but couldn’t move his body except blinking and eye movement, until his condition deteriorated and he couldn’t move anything at all. (He got better if anyone is worried.) Thinking back, they set up the whole episode to allow a patient who could barely interact as much room to be a character as possible. They changed the way they shot the show for that episode. A lot of it was from his perspective, which I’m pretty sure wasn’t something they really did before that. You could get to know him through his mental commentary. He wasn’t just some guy who sometimes blinked at the doctors, he was afraid and he wanted to comfort his wife and had opinions on the things people said while trying to keep him company without knowing him at all. It was memorable. They gave him choices. House wasn’t originally his doctor. They were in the same emergency room after House had a motorcycle accident. He was asked and got to decide to change doctors and get transferred to Princeton-Plainsboro, and you heard his reasoning. Even if he had to do it by blinking, he got to make a choice about whether he was satisfied with his medical care and what he wanted to do about it. They could have just had him admitted to Princeton-Plainsboro originally, and House could have taken his case with little to no need for the story to get his permission, but they didn’t. Instead it was a pretty big deal. When he lost the ability to communicate by blinking, the medical team used a long-shot idea to establish communication again with a brainwave-controlled computer interface. It took a long time, a lot of fruitless effort, and one of the doctors sitting vigil and finally pleading with him to please keep trying if he was still in there, before the computer interface responded in any way to his attempts to think at it. They didn’t have the interface work right away, which sounds unrealistic, or even respond erratically with nonsense as he learned to use it, which actually sounds more realistic to me now that I think about it. If it had given him at least some feedback to work with before he had a chance to decide to be invested in it, it would have been a lot less dramatic and also very much undercut his importance as a participant in his own story. It’s still very much agency to make the only real choice you have if it is actually an active decision, which this clearly was. So the way the story was set up and then told put the patient in a position to make choices, and let the audience experience them as active decisions with substance. That’s pretty good for a character who can only interact with his environment through blinking at people or thinking real hard at electrodes. Someone was obviously considering how characters interact with plot and how these things can strengthen or weaken each other. I’m pretty sure there’s a relationship going on there. I am personally a very bad writer. I’m sure I could improve with practice and all that, but it’s just not something I enjoy much so I probably won’t ever get that practice. I think that failing to set up situations so that characters have to make decisions while also failing to convey to an audience that characters are making choices on purpose sounds *exactly* like something I’d do. I haven’t read Twilight so I don’t know if it’s doing like I’d do. I do know that a lot of people seemed to think Bella was kinda useless as a protagonist and just stumbled into situations instead of really doing things. So I wonder.
that sounds really right. i love plot, but i come at it from a character driven angle. i don’t think, “mc is in jail and needs to be out of jail, i’ll have a huge tornado wreck the jail.” i think, “mc is carrying a latent storm god in his subconscious, and he’s an ornery survivor without scruples, how would he leverage this to deal with his Shitty Colonial Wizard Jail problem? summoning a direct hit from a F5 vortex would kill a bunch of his fellow prisoners, does he care about that? he sure doesn’t!”
I enjoyed the hell out of The God Eaters. I must say I was very pleased when Shitty Colonial Wizard Jail was forcibly introduced to the weather. It was cathartic. If someone gives me a structure, like part of a plot and some character ideas, I'm pretty decent at suggesting thematically appropriate motives, dynamics, actions, interactions, backstories, resolutions, etc. I do kinda wonder how much of that I'm reading off the other person, though. If they can tell me about their project and I can guess where specifically they're struggling and why, and have an idea of what kinds of things would appeal to them, that really does narrow the scope quite a bit from the set of all possible stories. If someone does happen to need a character to do a thing, I may be able to make a compelling case or three for exactly why a person might do the thing. I just do not do well without someone else providing structure. Now that I think about it, my "why would I want to do that?" reaction to writing out a story myself feels an awful lot like my frustration with having to show my work in math class. I went in five directions at once, zeroed in on the most promising one(s), and I can autopsy my results all day long because explaining will give me even more new ideas while clarifying my thinking, but trying to breathe some life into a reasonably orderly fictional retelling feels more like belaboring the point than it feels like it's helping.
Here we have a contender with Railrunner, Rose Potter, and Richard Rahl for most unlikeable protagonist ever. (Viviane of Mists of Avalon isn't technically a protagonist or I'd include her.) You know, we ought to make a list of unlikeable protagonists and vote on them!
i think this asshole would win by a mile. i’ve only read the sporking halfway, has he raped anyone yet? the sporking is a bit sporkable itself, tho. all that nerding about vtm. no one cares, dude. “why plagarize the game and then change everything except the names?” there you’re done. the horrible horrible protagonist is the book’s true sin.
yeah, as this goes on the vtm nerding is getting really tedious. once you’ve established that the book cherrypicked from the game, and doesn’t seem to understand why the game world is how it is, no more need be said. spending half of each sporking installment describing game canon as if the departure from it is a fresh and shocking sin is just embarrassing. either your audience plays the game, in which case they know, or they don’t play, in which case they don’t care. either way it’s irrelevant, because you told us right at the beginning that the author basically just stole the names and left the rest. at the most, put in an occasional brief “not how that works btw” reminder. don’t paraphrase the game manuals for 500 words at a go.
Okay, am I a bad person for laughing at this Gary Jennings review? Spoiler: genital mutilation, inadvisable sex acts Mixtli’s friend suffers an accident and has to undergo complete castration, balls and all, with only a hole left for the urethra. Later on, Mixtli and his friend are alone in the desert, an obvious opportunity for sexy-time. However, Mixtli uses his friend’s urethra as the nearest available orifice. I imagine the unrecorded part of the conversation just beforehand sounded like this: “Mixtli! There’s two other holes that aren’t nearly as likley lead to infection and permanent loss of bladder control. Why not use those? Please? Pretty please?” “No,” I said. “If I did that, I would totally turn gay!" What is it with bad books and unnecessary weird genital-related body horror?
Groin injuries in general kinda seem to be a theme of cheesy fantasy, now I think of it. Remember the six sentences about a guy grabbing his balls and falling over when kicked in The Eye of Argon?
Not a groin attack exactly, but one could argue the final confrontation with the Big Bad in this is loosely connected.
