So - Piers Anthony is a prolific writer. The Xanth series is probably one of his most popular and well-known ones, and it's commonly recommended as a good book for kids to read. This is probably because a casual flip through reveals that it's a fantasy novel with a lot of puns. A more thorough reading, uh, would reveal that it's actually closer to being a Harlequin romance with a fantasy veneer and an overload of puns. If there were Harlequin romances where the female protagonist were usually prepubescent or just barely entering puberty, anyways. There's a few other people on here who read this series growing up. So who else got really uncomfortable reading Spell for Chameleon? The later books weren't significantly better (Dolph having to pick between two brides - when the oldest person involved is sixteen, and the other two are twelve - and much being made about how both of these are arranged marriages where he doesn't get to choose to bow out of it but he's not allowed to marry both, and Oh Isn't It Tragic that no one can figure out a way out of this was particularly a wallbanger for me) but that first one was super bad about actually putting any kind of veil over the creepiness and misogyny.
yyyeah I read a fair number of these starting in high school and I don't know why. I mean, I honestly can think of PRECIOUS little I enjoyed- like, the puns were fun up until they started comprising like 90% of the books, and here and there I liked a secondary character a bit (Jumper you were the only good thing about Castle Roogna bby) but almost NEVER the main character (screw you Bink, screw you Dor, Dolph you're a dumbass and your plots are Stupid and your awesome talent is wasted on you, screw you Humphrey, screw your horrible contrived ignorance plot Grey, screw Anthony's writing of literally every female lead...) or the plots in general, just the occasional set piece. Part of it in retrospect was probably affected by my being ace and sex-repulsed and thus the HUGE amount of pretty ladies kicking up their heels, love springs, panty flashes and constant nigh-obligation for female characters to seduce their way out of problems at least once per book (only the pretty ladies though! if you're not Pretty then you will go on a booklong quest to BECOME pretty no really that's the kickoff for one of the later books. Or alternatively just mope now and then because you are merely Plain (aka hollywood homely) and not like, anime supermodel sexy like half the female creatures/characters) did absolutely nothing for me but make me roll my eyes. That said, Ana Mardoll, a genderqueer blogger who does a fair bit of deconstruction/sporky type posts (they're not always negative, mind- I've seen her do more analysis-type ones of Utena eps, for instance) has done posts on several of the Xanth books- reading them made me go 'OH RIGHT this was probably why 80% of these books had me fuming internally for no reason I could articulate at the time (other than the occasional later burst of 'UGH THIS PLOT IS DUMB AS HELL' when the stupidass Dolph love triangle came up for instance)'. Here's the index for the Xanth ones she's done, but by all means check out her other stuff under the plain 'deconstruction' tag!
I've read Ana Mardoll's deconstructions, yeah - I actually have her blog bookmarked! :D And yeah, Grey's entire existence was a horrible plot contrived mess. And just about no one uses their Talent cleverly (unless it benefits the plot for them to do so at that exact moment), and the part where Talents never repeated just...it's always struck me as completely stupid, because nothing else works like that ever. There's no reason given for why a particular magical talent wouldn't repeat itself in families, when all the rest of magical biology seems to follow real-world logic - you don't see centaurs giving birth to different types of 'taurs, you don't see a non-harpy hatching out of a harpy egg. I could excuse some amount of "well, we don't know what exactly will result" if two people with very different Talents have a kid together (Trent and Iris, for example) and for a range in strength, but you shouldn't be rolling the dice every time you have a kid. Plus, yeah. The puns. At the point where there needed to be an entire chapter of thank yous for suggestions that got used that book, there are entirely too many puns. And everything about Humphrey is obnoxious, gross, and needs to be set on fire. Same with Bink, and Dor, and pretty much every single male character; I feel like Grey needs to be set on fire twice, but I hated his plot especially. (I liked Ivy. Couldn't have cared less about her twin, though.) And - yes. Every time one of the focus characters was female and humanoid enough to get the stamp of "yup, that's sexually appealing", she always had to seduce her way out of some problem at least once in the book, and when she was the main character, there'd be a lot of internal narration about how she needed to be careful so that she wasn't seen in a way that would suggest Poor Moral Character. It always made me really uncomfortable, but I didn't manage to start mapping out the shape of why until after I'd read Letters to Jenny. Which is a collection of letters he wrote to a fan named Jenny, who would later have a namesake character in the series; he started writing them after her parents sent him a letter asking him to do so, because she'd been hit by a drunk driver and was in a coma, and he was one of her favourite authors and they were hoping that reading letters from him would help her wake up. So he wrote letters, lots of them - and after the first handful, they kept sliding into weird, inappropriate territory; the bit that particularly stands out to me is a limerick he wrote in one of them, about a cute girl who was bad at skating, which he preceded with "don't let your mom read this part to you, have your dad do it - your mom won't find it funny, mothers aren't allowed to have that sort of fun, it's part of the Adult Conspiracy", and the limerick ends with the line "what a silly little fool to put her *" (which is a clever visual pun, but doesn't really do anything about the fact that he just ended it with "ass to risk" and anyone who knows the name of that character symbol knows it). And that touch of weirdness and inappropriateness stayed there, even after she woke up and started doing physical therapy (she was permanently disabled by the accident and had to learn to use text-to-speech - one of the letters mentions how he's sure she's frustrated by needing to use a laser pointer to type out one letter at a time). The weird creepiness is in his other books too; I remember him complaining in one of the author's notes that he hated how people were so vehemently opposed to one of his other books, where he put his pre-teen female protagonist through serious trauma and sexual abuse only for her to get paired up with a Good Man who was old enough to be her father, and basically accusing everyone who didn't like that story of being prudes. (I don't even remember if he actually published that story; he might've been complaining that his publisher wouldn't take it. The part I do remember is that I would've been thinking "you're weird and creepy and you keep dropping your fetishes all over everything you write and it's super obvious" if I'd had the words for it at the time.)
