It is funny but also wrong in so many ways. Spoiler: nsfwish The intact breast iirc are a conicidence. harrys sexual orientation is partially confirmed for noticing them but the killer can´t even see his victims.
True. Though still, Harry takes the time to describe the corpse's breasts before describing the sucking chest wound, which is a touch creepy.
I mean, I get what he was going for, describing the mundane aspects of the surroundings before zeroing in on the crime, but that particular juxtaposition... erm.
One day I will write a story which describes something about every male character which would make male readers similarly uncomfortable, but the prevalence of dick pics implies that zeroing in on crotch bulges would only encourage them. Maybe it would work from the point of view of a male protagonist. Perhaps an otherwise heterosexually-presented male protagonist, since straight female protags constantly comment on other women's bodies and their own.
Certain old-skool romance novels have also given me the desire to try a social experiment of writing an openly child-molesting hero to see if readers will accept him as a swoon-worthy good guy simply because the heroine repeatedly tells them he is.
I guess that comment was unfair because the writing in those books isn't inherently terrible and idfic is a thing, so the fiction isn't awful. The thing is I feel it goes deeper than that. What upsets me is the dishonest advertising so many of them get. They get tagged "dubcon" when there is no consent of any kind, and they don't seem to be presented as idfic and people don't react to them as idfic.
Also, with one example, I can understand breaking down and giving in to one's captor solely to get to interact with another human after long enough spent locked in a dark room alone. But after only a few hours? Was the writer writing it in real time?
New favourite case of a character being too dumb to live; escaped trafficking victim takes off her tracking bracelet, drops it on the floor of the moving vehicle she is still in, does not exit the vehicle, and is surprised when she's found more or less immediately.
And the same character got even dumber. Her captor is French, and has been forcing her to speak to him in French. When she escapes, she suddenly realises she can't get access to a phone because she can't speak French. The word for phone in French is "phone". (ETA: The character was a native English speaker. Wouldn't have applied if she was a native Mandarin or Swahili speaker or anything. English, it does.)
"His hot length folded over me" as a way to describe a guy bending over the protagonist made me picture his penis as being bigger than she was. Ew.
Regarding dubcon, hmm. That’s actually a really interesting train of thought. At least it is to me, because it seems like my ideas about consent in fiction are not actually the same as my strongly held beliefs about consent in real life. Consent is most primarily about bodily autonomy, I would like to say. There’s plenty of dubcon that deals in situations where autonomy is compromised in favor of wellbeing, fuck or die being the most obvious. Even if consent is given in that situation, it’s under extreme duress. But the reader can usually expect that it will overall benefit the character in the end, and things will probably turn out more or less okay for them. Then there’s the type of noncon in which the character does not want to participate and will be harmed by the experience. Unless the other tags or summary suggest otherwise, this is probably what I would be most likely to vaguely expect from a story tagged as noncon before reading. Then there are stories where the character does not initially consent, but because it’s a work of fiction the reader is able to know that they’re not actually totally against the idea. The experience can be expected be mutually satisfying in the end, and the character will probably be more or less okay. At least according to whatever “okay” means in the universe of the story. A lot of works don’t fall neatly into just one category of course, or any of these at all. But for the sake of argument, I assert that there are at least some stories that would fit these descriptions. As a reader, I often find that last type of story to be a lot more similar a reading experience to the dubcon than the noncon. Even if the other character(s) have no reason that would ever pass in the real world for cause to believe they’re doing a remotely permissible thing, if the story and therefore the reader knows that the character is not completely unwilling and will have a good time in the end, that’s pretty different from reading a story where the reader knows the character is not okay and isn’t going to be okay, at least in my opinion. That’s obviously not a distinction that’s even remotely valid in real life, but in real life you can’t access anyone’s unvoiced inner thoughts, you can’t predict the future to know whether something generally very traumatic will in this case somehow work out, and the people involved are usually real and not genre-compliant. I don’t have any strong opinion about the tag usage issue. I can just think of a way in which a story might be received differently by different people, even to the extent that a complete lack of consent might honestly read as dubcon to some people. I thought it was kinda interesting that I might credit a conversation about consent that’s happening between me and the story, even if none happens between the characters. I don’t know that it applies to that specific story. I’m sure there are other reasons a story might be tagged as dubcon, such as a lack of insight on the part of the author, or concern about the reception of things tagged as noncon.
That's a good point. Conceded. However, I've seen multiple occasions where a situation was at best extremely dubious, and the readers seem to interpret it as the character consenting to everything when they didn't.
This writer's attempts at writing meaningful song lyrics remind me of the FATAL theme song, except even that had something approaching scansion.
Spoiler: TRIGGERS LIKE WHOA This book features the man who is supposed to be the romantic hero strangling his supposed true love to punish her for being raped, after he himself raped her repeatedly, and the book portrays this as a good thing. The writer has compared her husband to this character. God, I hope she meant a different characteristic.
Something else features a college-educated character who assumes that a drunken scrawl on a napkin constitutes an enforceable legal slave contract, in a country where slavery has been illegal for centuries. I hate it when things like this happen in books because it feels like not only are the characters stupid but the author assumes I am as well.
