I’m a bitch, but I’m a fair bitch

So, fine, I liked this a lot.

What? I did. Oh, shut up.

Those books are terrible! I’ve read the first four, have the fifth, but I made a terrible mistake before starting A Dance with Dragons: I read an entirely different book, a not-authored-by-George R. R. Martin book, that was actually good, or anyway I liked it, and now I canNOT go back to the shitty writing. Not yet, at least. I mean, I’ve tried, but:

The night was rank with the smell of man.

The warg stopped beneath a tree and sniffed, his grey-brown fur dappled by shadow. A sigh of piney wind brought the man-scent to him, over fainter smells that spoke of fox and hare, seal and stag, even wolf. Those were man-smells too, the warg knew; the stink of old skins, dead and sour, near drowned beneath ;akfjldsfdskjl;dasfjl;kadfskj;l STOPPPPPPPPPPP ITTTTTTTT.

It’s a piney wind that smells of three dozen other things; what say we list them all? Won’t that be fun? Animals have better senses of smell than we do, so I think I’m just going to take that cunning observation and beat you over the head with it until you recognize my genius.

And I mean, wargs–no. I just can’t with that shit, right now. Eventually I’ll be in the mood for something junky and twee again, and I’ll get back into it, but look, I’m sorry, she’s right about this*:

The problem is not that these books are “grim.” If anything, the “grim,” anyone-can-die plotty aspect is the one thing that kept me reading. (I do think that hailing these books as masterful looks at human nature or realpolitik, just because there are lots of rapes and murders and mutilations, is fundamentally adolescent; “no, it’s not just a fantasy book about dragons, like little kids read! Look, there’s violence! That’s for grown-ups! Also, did you know my Mom lets me watch R-rated movies sometimes?”) And the quality of writing in the books just isn’t very good in any other regard. I mean, dear God, the WRITING: The fakey, pseudo-British, Ren Faire approximation of “olden tymes” speech. The paper-thin, stereotypical characterizations. The presence of painfully obvious Nerd Identification Characters. (Tyrion and his endless, self-aggrandizing self-pity — he’s so much smarter than everyone else! But hot girls won’t fuck him! And nobody likes him enough! But he’s smarter than everyone else! Everybody SUCKS for not liking/wanting to fuck Tyrion! — is clearly designed to appeal to that specific variety of misogynist nerd who’s convinced that he’s always the smartest guy in the room, and is endlessly bitter that people aren’t sufficiently impressed by him and that women specifically don’t reward his brilliance with constant blow-jobs and praise. Or, there’s Sam and his “I’m unattractive, and not good at sports uh, combat, and I like to read about dragons, and I get picked on in school uh, the night’s watch; GEE, I WONDER IF I’LL TURN OUT TO BE SOME KIND OF UNLIKELY HERO IN THIS HERE FANTASY NOVEL WRITTEN FOR GUYS JUST LIKE ME” schtick, which just never stops being grating.) The redundant, redundant redundancy — how many times does Sam have to use the word “craven” per scene? — and the often laughably bad, cliched or awkward dialogue…. This is not great literature. It’s a series of potboilers and page-turners. And that’s fine, but it’s also fine to acknowledge that they are only appealing on the level of “what happens next,” and Martin can only keep up the “anything can happen next” schtick if he’s willing to let horrible things happen to the protagonists. So I don’t object to that, at all.

It’s not the grimness. It’s the stereotypical grimness of what happens to all of the female characters. Along with the stereotypical characterizations of the female characters. This is specifically gendered, and sexist, and it’s off-putting. Sure, fine: Show me Vargo Hoat eating his own chopped-off feet. Show me seven-year-olds being pushed out of windows. Show me all the grim shit you want. But if you can’t think of anything more interesting to threaten a female character with than “and then somebody tried to rape her,” over and over, to EVERY female character, AND you show rape as hot or romantic in some instances, I have every right to roll my eyes and call you creepy until the cows come home.

As for the righteously indignant Tumblr that wanted to finger-wag that “any feminist who thinks that post is funny should be ashamed of herself,” oh, go soak your head; that post was (1) hilarious, (2) well-written, and (3) mercifully free of finger-wagging and shaming and misapplied social justice concepts like, oh, I don’t know, treating “feminism” as a finishing school for potential rape victims? I mean what else should I be ashamed of, headmistress? Liking what the fuck I like, finding creepy and poorly written what I find creepy and poorly written? Big NO MEANS NO to that, I’m afraid.

–plus, damnit, everyone is out to molest Sansa. The problem is not in pointing that out–no, not even in pointing that out in a jokey way, sorry!–the problem is that everyone is out to molest Sansa, and more than once, the author clearly intends for you, the reader, to be fine with that, even delighted about that (hiiiiiii Tyrion! Morning, Sandor!).

So, no: Sady Doyle is not your problem there. You might ask yourself why you seemingly need her to be your problem, when all that gratuitous, glorified rape/incest/rape-incest/childfucking is sitting RIGHT THERE, being a massive problem already. You know? You might think on it.

This is what I think: I’m not inclined to tell survivors how to talk about this stuff. Survivors get to use every tool they have, including flippancy, including jokes, including anything that isn’t directly, maliciously targeted to hurt others, to get by. But I’m no one’s therapist. No one’s headmistress, either. (Dean of Feminism: Now there’s a job no one should ever want. And yet so many do, and so many of them are on Tumblr.)

But the basics, kids. Can we please revisit the basics.

Tangential re: these books, having nothing to do with all the rape/incest/rape-incest/childfucking, thank heavens: My boyfriend could not believe it when I told him about Hodor. Could not believe it.

“So he has to find some way to get this kid with bad legs from point A to point B. So, Hodor. But he can’t have Hodor be halfwitted AND mute, that would be overkill, and people would go, ‘You know, Hodor’s really not much of a character; Hodor may as well be a crudely constructed medieval wheelchair; also, wow, is this ableist.’ So he gives Hodor dialogue and has Hodor pipe up every now and then, so you don’t start confusing Hodor with the furniture, but on the other hand, there are already so  many characters that he has to kill half of them off just to keep it manageable, and by ‘manageable’ I mean ‘under 2000 pages,’ so I think by the time he got around to really needing Hodor, albeit as a Bran-conveyor, he was maybe character-created out? Plus he’s already established that Hodor is brain-damaged, so Hodor can’t suddenly be a fountain of wit and erudition. So the end result is that Hodor’s dialogue consists of the word ‘Hodor.’ His name, yeah. His dialogue is his name. And now I dread the Bran chapters, because I know it’s going to be pages and pages of ‘Hodor?’ ‘Hodor,’ or ‘HODOR!’ if he’s really scared or something. Hodor, Hodor, Hodor–”

–and he’s just looking at me while I’m saying all this, and finally he’s like, you’re kidding.

“No,” I said, “he really does that. You have to read these books! I have to talk to someone about how terrible they are.”

*Other things she’s right about, in no particular order: . . . no, in that post, I’m sorry, it’s everything. I think I was going to single out how annoying and incompetent and I-am-but-a-womb-with-legs Catelyn Stark is–Catelyn Stark practically started the whole goddamn war, but I’m supposed to love her for her fierce if fumbling displays of Mama Bear Love? I won’t, you can’t make me. Oh, or how Aryan Jesus Daenerys is, or how forced the whole Arya thing feels–also, why do Arya’s feelings for her half-brother always seem to have an aura of romance about them WAIT, I THINK I KNOW THIS ONE–and I only just noticed now that “Arya” is “Aryan” without the “n,” which I think is just unfortunate coincidence, but on the other hand, yes: These books are very, very white, which I also think Sady addresses really well, but let’s gloss over that because ohnoes, she behaved impertinently towards your fandom, and didn’t apply the proper Serious Face when discussing Sansa.

I mean how will people know you take things seriously if you don’t put on your Serious Face first?! And where’s the goddamn triangle? Where’s the “This Journal is Sansa-Positive” triangle? How do I know this is safe space without the triangle?

Anyway, no, it is not just those characters. It’s everything.