I wonder if that's the fetish for extremely elongated saggy boobs that I sometimes encounter in searches for NSFW art? They end up looking like the balloons clowns use to make balloon animals.
The character was supposed to be young and hot, so "saggy" isn't what immediately springs to mind. And it can't be an error, because the writer apparently thought this description was so clever they used it again in a different book; all I read was the samples, so for all I know they use this term in every book.
The character in one of the pulps there, when escaping from an alien slave ship, didn't bring any food or water into the space-dinghy, but did bring shaving soap and a razor. Clever, man, clever.
Regarding the post above about the guy who brought shaving soap and razor but no food and water, it just occurred to me; how did he plan to use the shaving soap without water?
Reading the Terry Goodkind sporks again, and the problems with Sword of Truth are a big chunk of my anxiety about writing without a solid outline (I know rewriting is normal but with an outline a lot less rewriting needs to be done); Sword of Truth seems to run on dream logic because the writer just put down whatever the hell popped into his head without checking whether it fit with the rest. The characters forget things they've already spent pages telling each other; the bad guy knows where the hero is well enough to attach a magical tracking cloud to him at the beginning of the book, but later seems to not know the hero exists. Then he sends a mob to attack the good guys in one of their homes, waits till the mob fails to kill them, waits some more, then sets the house on fire after the heroes are already long gone. He tries to wipe out the magical organisation the love interest belongs to and sends assassins after her, but then later on talks about how he needs her alive for his magical ritual, even though the assassins were seen trying their utmost to kill her. I think it amounts to the writer having strong ideas for scenes but not putting any effort into making them fit together.
I quote the Evil Overlord List: "When a group of my minions fails at something, I will not berate them for incompetence then send the same group out to try the same task again."
Shortly, I'm going to begin sharing bits and pieces of the House of Night series. One of many, many, many things that is increasingly bothering me as I progress through the books, is the introduction of a character who's supposed to be a poetry prodigy, and amongst many, many, many other problems with her characterisation, her poems are crap. Because the authors are even worse at writing poetry than prose.
It's really hard to identify with a kidnapped heroine when she knew the guy had been stalking her for over a week, he had forcibly kissed her on at least three occasions, and he was calling and sending flowers to her workplace, and for no reason whatsoever she decided to not tell anyone about this. I mean, yeah, given that the book was written in 1980 anti-stalking and harassment laws were probably not enforced that well, but you'd think she'd at least warn her female friends, ask her workplace to stop accepting calls from the guy since he had no business calling them, or complain to her fiance. I can understand that she might not want to get into detail, but "hey, there's a creepy guy bothering me" would probably be a smart thing to say. He hadn't threatened her life if she told or anything, and he was a stranger so it wasn't a case of not wanting to rock the boat with someone she knew.
Yeah. For those who have not been exposed to it, House of Night is a series of YA vampire novels. Here is a basic list of... things... off the top of my head: The white-passing heroine's Cherokee heritage is treated as somehow explaining her high level of natural magical ability. She frequently feels the "blood of her ancestors" cheering her on in her supernatural destiny because they're proud of her for having vampyre magic instead of just regular Cherokee magic (which is totally a thing). Her Cherokee grandmother still practices the "old ways", such as smudging and other purification rituals, which conveniently fit very tidily into a neo-Wiccan ritual format, and are described in language sometimes taken almost verbatim from New Age websites. She regularly congratulates straight male characters (and, to a lesser degree, herself) for not using homophobic slurs, while also repeatedly noting that her gay male friend is not too "swishy" or "fluttery" like those "over-the-top" gays, who she doesn't like. When he gets a boyfriend, she regularly points out that he is more "swishy", but it's okay, because he's not as camp as those guys. Misogyny like whoah, predominantly in the form of extensive slut-shaming and unabashed double standards. Any time her hair is messed up in any way she refers to it as "nappy" (an often pejorative term for Afro-textured hair). She also compliments multiple black girls' hair as either "clearly a fantastic weave" or acknowledges it as natural with the caveat that "she is clearly mixed" (to explain why it's so long and gorgeous instead of being "nappy"). One of her teachers begins flirting with her, and although she's very attracted to him, she doesn't want to cheat on her boyfriend. He steps it up and tries to straight-up seduce her; when she rebuffs his advances, he forcibly activates her vampiric bloodlust to get her to stop protesting. This is portrayed as being her mistake for making ~slutty~ choices, rather than her teacher, who used a mind-altering substance on her to get her into bed. The list goes on. I've been MSTing it with a friend over WhatsApp, so I have a lot of quotes and stuff stored on my phone. It's quite remarkable.
As appallingly bad YA goes, House of Night is.... pretty up there. I think I chewed through the first four books before the inertia of "new thing to read" finally hit the wall of "this is really just, not, good, at all, it sure isn't".
wow holy shit how did I miss out on these as an extensively vampire-reading YA (thank goodness I did though... w o w)
It also adds a whole extra layer of creepy to the way it talks about sex and relationships sometimes when you remember that the coauthors are a mother and daughter.
I don't consider it creepy for a mother and daughter to be able to discuss sex and relationships to that extent, but what I do find creepy is the sex-negative, slut-shaming, rape-culture-accepting way in which this particular mother and daughter decide to formulate their portrayal of relationships (while framing this as a modern and enlightened attitude, contrasted deliberately with fundamentalist Christians' sexism).
I got up to 6 recently and it went from "bad, like the stuff I very frequently hate-read" to "oh my god it is actually genuinely difficult to make myself continue reading this". Strong suspicion that they pulled an Anne Rice and fired their editor - they also change the spelling of a minor character's name (Deino to Denio) and begin spelling "deosil" as "deasil" after having used "deosil" in all the previous books.
