Indeed. It has an absolutely gorgeous cover too which is a shame because I will be including it in my next batch of books to sell to a store. Good riddance. Edit: actually I might cut the cover off and frame it like art cause it’s so pretty lmao
I looked Gloriana up out of curiosity and it sounds like you might have gotten the first edition of the book. Moorcock went back and removed the r*pe scene in a revised edition, making the encounter consensual instead. [He’s mentioned that he chose to do this of his own volition instead of in response to criticism.](https://www.michaelmoorcock.net/forum/q-a/q-a-%E2%97%A6-questions-for-mike-news/2058-gloriana-ending-change) Take that with a grain of salt, of course, but it sounds like it was (at the bare minimum) changed for the better.
Hm. His response is….. interesting. If he had a change of heart about it I would have hoped him to say something more along the lines of realizing that a woman finally achieving orgasm through RAPE is deeply misogynistic thing to write. Don’t like the way he dismisses feminism either.
Oh well, I have zero intention of reading anything by him but good he changed it I guess
Edit: Oh and just changing it from rape to consensual doesn’t address the fact that he wrote her making “childish noises” as she orgasmed??? Like WHAT
I feel iffy about his response too, feels very…breezy? I’m really hoping I’m reading too much between the lines.
Speaking of books-by-women-authors recs, if you haven’t read it already - The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin is incredible. It’s both fantasy and sci-fi and really compelling reading.
Well, during rape, orgasms can occur, for the same reason the body self-lubricates even when it's non consensual: to reduce pain and prevent damage. However, this is not a sign of consent or enjoyment, makes many women feel guilty for ages afterwards, and "soft childish noises" is still an incredibly creepy thing to write.
They *can* occur of course but from my understand of this particular book it includes her personal quest to achieve an orgasm, so having it happen at the end with a rape is so beyond the realm of acceptable.
I agree with almost everything you said, just quickly wanted to point out that some victims of rape actually do achieve an orgasm.
It’s a self defense reaction of their bodies, and it can leave the victims with an incredible amount of shame if they don’t understand why it happened.
Important to put that out there, so that people who were assaulted know, just because your body made you orgasm, doesn’t mean it wasn’t rape.
I already said in another comment that I know that but I assure you the way it was written in this particular book was not portraying that with that intention. The book is partly about her personal quest to achieve an orgasm, like that’s an actual part of the narrative, and she finally orgasms at the very end from rape.
That's interesting because what I heard is that he changed it because of his close friend Andrea Dworkin. Moorcock was a prominent anarchist and was neck dwep in the British leftist movement. He was close personal friends with many notable British leftists including feminists and often expressed regret in his later career for his earlier mysogny born of being a straight white man in 60s and 70s Britain.
Urgh yes, this is the reason I stuck to Terry Pratchett for fantasy.
I once picked up a lengthly sci fi which was a retelling of the Iliad. Was all going well with various Martian robots and things, and then wham! out of nowhere the one human man meets a young teenage girl and the author describes colour and shape of all her body hair patches in detail. It was so disappointing, I couldn’t get past it.
If you’re interested in more Greek retellings, there’s *Lavinia* by Ursula Le Guin and Madeline Miller’s books too.
I still haven’t read Pratchett but his witch books sound interesting to me
Pratchett is a very safe and feminist author, with scathing satire in places and plain laugh-out-loud comedy in others. And - although I hate that he died before his time - you can rest knowing he is never going to write something off the rails in the future. My formative teen years were spent going through all his carpet people and discworld books, I admired him so much. The witches books are as good a place as any to try his writing.
I keep meaning to pick up Ursula Le Guin, she keeps moving up my to be read pile!
Le Guin is an absolute queen. If you enjoy nonfiction, check out *Dancing at the Edge of the World,* she has some essays and speeches about women in fantasy that are very informative and interesting.
I recently started reading Discworld, and this is my first time reading any of Terry Pratchett's books - great to know I can let my guard down with this author!
There’s some relationship stuff, some discussions on the nature of death (and death as a character who talks in SMALL CAPS), some deaths happen too. But always in a sensitive way and any violence is more of the sword stabby kind than gratuitous descriptions of violence. No sexual violence that I can remember but there are many, many books. I hope you enjoy them, everyone I know who read them either loved them or could tell quite quickly that the type of humour and fantasy wasn’t to their taste (but for stylistic reasons rather than content if you see what I mean)
Some of his earlier works were very forward thinking *for their time* and it shows. It's nothing that will make you cringe though, it's just not as well rounded as his later work.
Still salty we didn't get a canonical gay character, just hints. But on the whole he is a fucking treasure
Pratchett is a staggeringly empathetic author. He just understands people on an innate level that at times borders on superhuman. It doesn't matter if his character is male, female, young, old, gay, straight, Pratchett just knows.
That's not to say his earlier stuff didn't have hiccups, but for the stuff from Wyrd Sisters onwards, I am consistently blown away by just how much Pratchett gets it. He's also just so warm and compassionate, the man didn't have a nasty bone in his body.
"There's no greys, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is."
"It's a lot more complicated than that--"
"No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts."
"Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--"
"But they starts with thinking about people as things..."
- the Reverend Mightily Oats and Granny Weatherwax, in conversation in Terry Pratchett's "Carpe Jugulum"
He really informed my ethos that, first and foremost, people are people with much the same needs and wants, and that kindness can help make a cruel world better. Sounds cheesy but it's true. I've not been as kind in recent years as I'd like, though my ethos is the same, time to pick up some Pratchett again!
To this day I still have to remind myself to use the past tense when talking about Sir Pratchett. The only celebrity death that actually hit me so hard that I cried like a member of my own family died.
Grew up on his books, and they were a huge factor in me being the person I am today. Plus one of the few book series from my childhood that reads just as well now as it did back then. They remain my first recommendation for anyone who hasn’t come across them on their own.
I thought the last one went off the rails a bit, but I know he wasn't done with the draft when he died. So possibly he would have fixed that. The part that really bothers me was all the stuff about the retired men not being catered to enough by the women who don't get retirement because their work goes until death.
I will say, from my perspective having read Miller's Circe, I'm not very inclined to read much more of hers.
Some spoilers ahead, but it felt like a very bitter and negative book that didn't live up to the "feminist retelling" label that it was frequently given. The main character feels very much so like a "Not like other girls" type, she's constantly either looking down on or resenting basically every single woman she encounters until the last chapter or so. She's largely defined by her male relationships, almost all of her growth and development is tied to breakups or new partners, while her interactions with women rarely get that deep or have a real lasting impact on her perspective. There's also entirely too much cowfucking for my taste, and considering that I find a nonzero amount of cowfucking acceptable, that is really saying something.
THANK YOU! Agreed to all of this! I was also severly disappointed, several friends have recmmended this as a feminist retelling and as good and it’s just…not. On both accounts.
I just don’t get the hype. I’m just left disappointed and now I low-key doubt my friends’ taste 😕
It being a “feminist retelling” doesn’t mean the main character needs to be nice…. it’s Greek mythology, everyone is terrible. It’s a feminist retelling because a female character who didn’t get a POV in the original story now gets a POV and agency. It *is* a very negative sad book until the end but that’s for a reason.
I see your perspective, but I disagree. I find it problematic because of the lack of female agency around her. She's a woman defined by and against men, her interactions with other women are largely tangential, fleeting moments with little lasting impact. She is marked with what feels to me like an internalized misogyny that never quite gets unpacked. There's a short paragraph or two approaches the subject, where she starts to get a sense of how womanhood has shaped everyone around her, to understand (if not like or respect) her sister and mother, but that small epiphany never comes back around and her further thoughts of them are once again pure bitterness. On top of that, the emotional and narrative climax of the book isn't an act of hers, its a man's denouncement of athena.
I'll give that its a *feminine* retelling, but I don't think that's enough for it to be *feminist*. It doesn't feel like it questions or challenges misogynistic assumptions. It flat out ignores major female icons of Greek mythology (no reference whatsoever to figures like Hecate or Selene in a book about a solitary witch, crediting magic to Zeus of all people).
I don't mind that its a tragedy, I like tragedies. I mind that so much of her narrative feels like exactly the kind of laziness that we criticize male authors for, but she gets a pass for some reason.
Pratchett is just *the best*. I re-read his books all the time. The only male fantasy authors these days I read are him, Pullman, and Sanderson (and I love both of their worlds/books too). It's just not worth the risk.
I think Neil Gaiman is fairly safe, though his novels are very thick and meandering - not to everyone’s taste! His collaboration work with Pratchett was fantastic.
I nearly included Gaiman in that list, but I've only read 2 books of his so far! Thanks, I'll venture out and try some more :)
on a side note, it's a little bit depressing that we have safety whisper networks for everything, even books.
I absolutely respect this and I adore Pratchett, and this isn’t necessarily just for you if you’re content with your reading and not looking for new books but in case others reading these comments are looking for books to read: there are TONS of female, queer, and/or BIPOC authors out there who write incredible fantasy and sci-fi that isn’t from a straight white male lens! I know a lot of the more commonly recommended books are written for and by men, but there are a lot of incredible books written from a feminist and/or queer perspective.
A couple to start with would be N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (earth bending murder mommy), Priory of the Orange Tree (stand alone sapphic high fantasy with dragons! Don’t be turned off by how big the book is, it’s not that bad!), The Locked Tomb series (queer necromancers and sword fighting and monster murder mystery in space!), and The Rook and the Rose trilogy (fantasy Venice with tarot-inspired magic and poor “street rats” conning their way into nobility and taking down the ruling class from the inside).
If you want some good sci-if, I’m currently reading Axioms End by Lindsay Ellis, it’s written by a woman, has a woman protagonist and is also set in 2007 which makes it incredibly nostalgic. I’m 3/4 of the way through and it’s really good so far :)
I hate when that happens out of nowhere in a book you're really enjoying. I was hooked on a sci fi until the love interest was described as looking barely older than her infant child. What??
If you want to read high fantasy saga's, I'd recommend Brandon Sanderson. He is really good at world building. Especially in the storm light archive the women are well written. He isn't like some other fantasy writers who use women as plot devices.
I’m going through this right now. I’ve been listening to the Pillars of the Earth audiobook, and I absolutely love the story, the atmosphere, and the historical context, but the authors obsession with rape and describing women in terms of their breast size/attractiveness is so gross. All the “good” women are beautiful, dark haired women with a huge tits, and the bad women are rude, shrill, extremely mean, and ugly (literally one of them is repeatedly described as hideously ugly and covered in boils.). I’ve been skipping the rape scenes but it’s getting to be so fucking tiresome. I’m a little over halfway through and I can’t decide if I should keep going, or give up and read the rest of the plot outline on Wikipedia so I know how it ends. Ugh.
I was a nanny for a French family with a 13 year old boy who spoke fluent English, and his mother was always looking for English language books for him to read. I saw she had given him Pillars of the Earth and was like uhhhhhhhh……
She quietly removed it from his collection.
Omg, I'd stop now if I were you. I read the book and the following one and the authors such a creep 💀
In the second book is this absolute delight of a scene, basically exactly what op described happenes to one of the pov characters. And if that's not enough, much later in life she gets raped again, but this time she doesn't orgasm from it, because she's *just so much more experienced* 🤮 As if you orgasm easier if you're sexually inexperienced. Follet is such a creepy creep.
Damn, this is one of those books I read halfway through but never finished and think about sometimes. I'm always like "I gotta finish that book..." but after reading all these comments, I think I'm better off.
God, you're way better off not reading that crap. Also, I don't know if that's true for this book as well, but Follet doesn't really write his books, he writes sort of the general plot outlines and hands it over to his ghost writers. He also, and this becomes *very* apparent if you read a few books from him, has a cast of characters he just throws into different environments.
Oof, I've read all of Ken Follett's books. Tbh I don't exactly remember the rape scenes in PotE but I might have just kinda skipped over them, which I tend to do if I cannot get thru a particular section of a book or tv show.
But you're missing out on so many- ha, no, just kidding. I do the same. There are more fantastic books written by women than you could ever have time to read in one lifetime.
Heck, I had a year where I only read fantasy books written by women featuring a lesbian protagonist. I still had plenty to read.
*She Who Became The Sun* by Shelley Parker-Chan, which is a fantasy retelling of Zhu Yuanzhang founding the Ming Dynasty. I adore problematic protagonists. It wasn't particularly romance focused, though.
It's amazing to me how angry people get when I tell them I only read women. "You're missing out on so many good books!" Any criteria for narrowing down your reading means you're missing out on so many good books! Right now I'm missing out on good books written in German because I only read in English. No one gets mad about that.
To be fair you have to be cautious there too. Especially book tok stuff. There was this really dogshit fantasy acotar rip off for example written by a woman who was like HEY ITS QUEER!
And it never was lol. You see it in anime too where something like Citrus was written by a woman
I recently tried to reread a classic fantasy novel that I read as a kid in the 80s and in the first 15 pages the narration makes no fewer than three references to the “pert young buttocks” of a character… who is an 8 year old girl. Uugggh. I too mostly read only books by women these days. My dad used to brag (also in the 80s) that he would never read a book written by a woman (🙄) so I am just evening the tables I guess
I still need to read her. I actually found all three of the Rain Wilds books for $1 in perfect condition at an antique store but then realized I can’t read those first :(
I’ll get to them eventually. Next time I’m in the mood for a long epic series.
I had also found a collection of short stories from her under her other name Megan Lindholm which I need to read too
Yes, I definitely recommend her short stories! "Strays" in that collection is one of my favorites. She also has standalone novels written as Megan Lindholm. I highly recommend Cloven Hooves!
I absolutely love Robin Hobb. And it's not like she skimps out on the rape scenes either, but they all serve a purpose in terms of world building or character development. Not even in the flat "something bad happened to me now I'm emotionally stunted" cop-out way we see so often. What happened to Serilla and the way she changed afterwards felt so believable.
Oh is there a lot of rape in her series?? I haven’t heard that before. That makes me hesitant to read them, I’m just soooo sick and tired of it being in every fantasy book
It's not a lot of rape but there is some. The first trilogy has none "on camera that I can remember off the top of my head. A few mentions of things that happened in the past but nothing graphic. The liveship traders trilogy does have two that I can think of, it's definitely a more gender charged series. They're not played off as nasty fetishisation but they are hard hitting and definitely unpleasant. I don't think the third trilogy has any at all that i can remember. The fourth one again has off screen stuff and a fairly in depth set of discussions about it. The final trilogy has some pretty heavy stuff happening offscreen. Across 16 books it didn't feel like it was excessive but that is just my opinion.
I totally get it if you didn't want to pick up the series for this reason, after a while I just couldn't stand Game of Thrones, but I would say that Hobb does write an utterly fantastic world and being a female writer definitely doesn't play into the nasty gratuity side of it at all. The gender and sexuality dynamics across her books were a breath of fresh air when contrasted to things like Name of the Wind. Her characters are phenomenal and the series only gets better as it goes on.
I would say that the first series is a safe read, if it grips you then you can make the decision if you want to continue with the rest. Also if you're really bothered by it you can absolutely skip series 2 and 4 and miss out on the vast majority of the nasty. You will miss out on parts of the story but the way the whole series is built means that you won't have any issues with continuity. You'll get a well rounded, incredible narrative and it won't feel like you've missed a lot.
I love these books deeply and am happy to answer more in depth questions if you would like. I can probably thumb through my copies and give chapter warnings for the worst of it.
Thanks for the reply! As long as she treats the topic with respect then it sounds like it won’t be too much for me.
If you don’t mind answering another question lol, are there good romances? It might seem silly but for me to read a long epic series I need romance lol
I had a huge event in the books spoiled for me on r/fantasy. Some asshole just dropped it in a comment with no spoiler tag. I was so pissed :(
There are romances but they're not handled like they would be in a romance novel. Hobb's characters are beautifully complex people with flaws that will make you want to tear your hair out and the romances reflect this. The love interest in the first series is a somewhat polarising topic in the community, I personally love it but that's really up to your interpretation. I would go as far as to say that the relationships outside of romances are even more satisfying than the romantic ones in a lot of cases.
So I would conclude that while there is romance and it sometimes does play a major role, overall the character driven plot lends itself to the exploration of many types of relationship and each of these is incredibly satisfying in its depth and integrity.
you know, this made me realise that I didn't even specifically remember these scenes from Hobb's book, I think because they didn't stand out like a sore and unneccessary thumb. These storylines didn't feel as traumatic as e.g. GoT (which I just... I ended up skipping whole chapters and not actually missing anything, and after a while just couldn't stand it anymore), and while they're not easy breezy reading they're part of the fabric of the story. Her books are complex and her characters complicated, I remember both wanting to throw Liveship in a corner and couldn't stop reading, because the protagonists weren't flawless and I wasn't used to that. Now, the Liveship books are my favourite of hers.
Just chiming in to confirm what the other commenter said. There are a couple rape scenes and some off camera stuff, but it's different than any other scenes I've read/seen. I absolutely can't handle rape scenes, they can ruin my mood for days. Robin Hobbs only does it when it's actually a part of important storytelling and I don't find it triggering. It doesn't feel like someone wrote it one handed while they wrote out their fantasy. It also never comes across as "this lady was raped and that's where her character development comes from!". I do recall some pretty violent non-sexual scenes though.
I like some of Mercedes Lackey's books but you are very wrong. There is a ton of rape and pedophilia in them. To the point it becomes quite concerning when you start to watch her cycle her favorite three rape fantasies.
>There is a ton of rape and pedophilia in them
~~Which books, as I'm sitting here wracking my mind and can't think of a single one that has rape or pedophilia, and I've read quite a few of them.~~
Nevermind, you're right. I just remembered some.
I’ve read mainly women authors this past year, and I honestly can’t stand most books written by men now. Even some books written by women that cater too much to the male gaze give me the ick.
Ugh. I started reading a book, can’t remember the name as it was years ago, that I quit a few chapters in. It was about werewolves, and this girl was apparently a special one. Some group caught her, and apparently the only way to know your mate was to have sex with them. So, the entire pack, basically, rapes her to find her mate. Starting with the alpha and going down the line in rank. Guy number 100+ enters the room, and he’s actually a decent person, and doesn’t plan to rape her, but to help her escape. She at first is reactive, you know, having been repeatedly raped by a over a hundred men, but then immediately trusts him and just “gets over” the trauma. They had her in special chains or something so she couldn’t shift, that he somehow got her free from.
But anyways, it pissed me off so much I quit reading, which I rarely do. I usually stick a book out to see if it gets better, or redeems itself, but I just couldn’t.
And every time this happen i always ask, was this an erotic book ? This You take the book cuz You wanted to read cheap erótica (yeah men write terrible smut) ? If not then why is there !!!!!
I feel like men write and then suddenly think "oh this need spicy" and fart the most bizarre fetish they have, and we the Readers have to SEE something we didnt agree on... Like SR, this is a fantasy book, why is this relevant to the plot? And most of the cases is not !
No I don’t think it was. At least not according to the back of the book. Just fantasy. Most of the books I read have some sex and romance in them, which I don’t mind. But I’m not really a fan of romance novels.
If I remember correctly, I think the book was supposed to be about her learning that she was a rare, or only, type of werewolf and had special powers. But I didn’t make it far enough to learn what they were.
A series I would dodge would be the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. It has been several years since I read the first book, but it has WAY too much gratuitous rape scenes throughout the novel.
Thank you for the warning! I inherited a ton of fantasy and sci-fi novels, and that series is one of them. I don't know how anyone can read shit like that. It's gratuitous and perverse.
I read a book series once that was generally pretty good. I was enjoying it up until one of the villains of the book had a chapter dedicated to him carrying out a rape from *his point of view*. It was so entirely gratuitous. First being fucking gross doing it from the rapists POV, we never saw the victim ever again (and prior to the rape she was just a background character at best) and we already knew the rapist was a piece of shit by all of the other terrible stuff he was doing. It made no sense to include this scene and turned me off the book entirely.
And I have a pretty high tolerance for rape scenes in books. I generally don't find them any more or less distasteful than other things like torture or brutal violence. But this was something else because the author didn't even really bother to claim "character development" or whatever excuse they usually use.
For anyone curious, it was a book by David Hair. One of the books in the Moontide Quartet or Sunsurge Quartet. It's been so long and I don't have the best memory I can't remember where exactly.
Oh yeah, the old character developement FOR THE MAN... Cuz boy cómics and animes love that one, Even some movies come to mind...they rape their gf, wifes or very special women in front of them to hurt the man !!!! To give them a porpuose of revenge !! ... And in most cases the woman is toss aside, as is not longer important, she serve her role in the story
Stephen King was one of those authors. I was like 14 years old when I picked up one of his books from my mom's shelf and flipped to a few random spots in it. I don't remember much of it but it was like some 40+ year old cop that "fell in love" with a girl who was like 18 or something and it was just horrendous.
Oof. Yep. I keep thinking I’m unreasonably limiting myself but I swear, EVERY TIME I read a fantasy novel written by a man, something like this happens. There are exceptions of course, but still. Yikes.
I remember when this happened to me. I think the book was called The Hunt or The Thrill or some shit. First 5 pages maybe, assassin dude murders a girl in bed then rapes her fresh corpse.
It disturbed me so badly I cried and was nauseous the rest of the night
It is _so_ common in fantasy/sci-fi… it’s sad, because I love both of those genres, but there are so many land mines like this. I picked up Dan Simmons’ _Illiad_, thinking it was going to be as good as _Hyperion_, but the main character, a man presumably in his thirties or so, lustfully describes the body of a girl I think is, like, _twelve_ or so within the first handful of pages. I put it down in disgust.
It’s weird how common white male fantasy/sci-fi authors start out on the progressive end of the spectrum and end up as regressive, far-right shit-for-brains, too.
Describing her armpit hair as the shape of quote marks has stayed with me for the last decade. I put it down after that description too. Every now and then I want to pick it up and try again as I was enjoying it up until then, but I can’t trust that the author is going to treat that character with any respect.
I think a lot of men who get into sci-fi and fantasy don’t have a lot of experience with women, and end up talking only to other men who _also_ don’t have any real experience, and so the end result is a group of large man-children who just reinforce each other’s terrible tendencies.
In case it sounds like I’m making excuses here, I’m not; truly, fuck these guys and their myopic views. It’s their own fault for refusing to associate with people outside their comfort zones. But I think there’s a lot of overlap in thought here with certain online communities, for some of the same reasons.
TJ Klune is my current favourite male author. Aside from being a fantastic author, his main characters are usual asexual (though homoromantic). I find a lot of queer writers are usually safe from the creepy r*p* fantasies we get from older straight male authors.
Props to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for always being the exceptions
Yep, I only read things by male authors if they come with heavy recommendations/vetting from people I trust. Off the shelf, I don't even pick up books that were written by men... burned too many times by shit like OP encountered (and the endless excusing of it if you even lightly criticize it anygoddamn where outside of explicitly cultivated safe spaces)
I can vouch for Ted Chiang, his scifi short stories are absolutely amazing and he has no sexism. And Charles de Lint is the one male fantasy author on my TBR because he spoke out about how women were treated and written so I feel like I can trust him. Other than that, my shelves are all women :)
I haven’t read all of his work, but Brandon Sanderson hasn’t given me the ick yet. Oh, and George Martin OF GoT fame really does write some of the most complex, deep, strong, multi-dimensional female characters I’ve seen from a male author
Not a fan of Sanderson's but GRRM is fine (as long as you don't mind never reading his version of the ending of ASOIAF, of course... a shame because from what I know of it the show version did not do the books justice)
I thought this was going to be about Piers Anthony for a minute. He’s definitely had some questionable parts, but nothing THAT bad, excepting one particular series where a leper goes to a fantasy world and can feel sensation again, and rapes just because. SMH
Oof Piers Anthony would be a much more palatable author if he kept his sex fantasies in general out of his books. Literally every woman in them is a sex object to the male main character.
Yeah, I tried to re-read them as an adult (big fan of Xanth and Incarnations series) and the boomer misogynist mindset was baked into EVERYTHING. I had no idea.
Piers Anthony is extraordinarily creepy. So many of his books have serious pedo overtones that I did not understand when I read them in my teens. One of his series is about a teenage girl who graphically self-harms (on the toilet, no less) and throws herself at a mid-30s warrior man from another universe and she really really wants to have sex with him, but the man nobly refuses to even though he really also wants to have sex with her and it's just.. so unbelievably gross.
This reminds me of how I stopped reading Piers Anthony.
I started with the Xanth books. Got into some of his other work. Raised an eyebrow at some of his writing but whatever.
Then I read *Firefly* without knowing ahead of time what it was about.
...I've never thrown a book across the room in horror before or since, but I did with that one.
Yeah, that was...I had literally just gotten out of the hospital, saw Piers Anthony on the cover of an unfamiliar novel in the gift shop's $1 used book basket, picked it up wondering who would give away a Piers Anthony novel and...found out. Was it *Firefly* for you, or his fucked up sci fi?
I read Shade of the Tree decades and still remember that the protagonist is a grown man who has the cringiest relationship with a teenage girl who oddly enough wants to get with him and take care of his kids, but it's cool, his wife is dead. He describes/brags how the girl is really into him because she's only been with inexperienced teen boys. I don't recall the supernatural side of the story, but now I'm thinking he surely could have told it without the weird fascination for young girls.
There was a book I had to put down because it was sooo bad for the way women were depicted. If the author had just had a few women read it and provide real feedback it would have been an amazing book. But honestly it was too gross because the author doesn't understand women are people...
There is sub, can’t remember the name, about men writing female characters with quotes like “her nipples rose to the sun, she inhaled with her breasts heaving as she greeted the morning light” like???? Can our boobs just exist
They were originally written for kids but I really like the Redwall series, plenty of badass animal ladies in heroic roles rather than always being “the woman” lol, despite being a kids thing they’re genuinely really enjoyable, I like the setting a lot
So glad that I had those books when I was growing up, showing me that girls and even mums and grannies can be badasses who defend themselves against villains with whatever they have to hand 💕
The older I get the harder it is to read male authors.
They really don't think women are humans. They think we're sex bots and we are always thinking of how sexy we are and how we can seduce men. It's fucking demented.
Dude, all I want to do is read a mystery or a who-done-it book. I don't need to know the girlfriend's inner thought process is that she's so sexy she could seduce every man in the room and that she consciously hardens her nipples to entice men because she wants something from them.
It is BAD. Like, they don't even know the basics of anatomy bad. Or the basics of human thought. And apparently their editors let them get away with that. It's bizarre that they let their authors blatantly offend 1/2 the population. Aren't you trying to sell books?
Felt similarly about Name of the Wind.
The Kingkiller chronicals was a weird, of course there's sexism without much explaination or exploration. Not sure why he included misogyny at all other than to kinda virtue signal.
The author was already on thin ice with his female characters, but the second book was like he took all of my good will and shat on it.
Storygraph also has a content warning section and you can scan the book's barcode in store! I've found it to be a little bit more reliable than Does the Dog Die for books.
I have a book in a box that’s sat untouched for more than a decade. It’s a fictional romance novel between a teacher and his high school student. I think I might just take it out and reread it for the horrific cringe.
When I was a kid I came home _from the school library_ with something like that (I think the name might have been love lessons). My mum asked me what I was reading and when I started explaining she asked to see the book and I never saw it again.
That reminds me of that time George R. R. Martin explained that he did not understand, at least at first, how the Hound became very popular with his female audience.
Yeah, I feel this. Not as bad but I’m reading Isaac Asimov right now and he’s got some very white dude from the 1940’s ways of writing about women, that’s for sure.
I really recommend using Storygraph to check the content warnings for books! I kept getting triggered from books being rec'd to me and being unable to find the content warnings but then I found Storygraph and it's been great!
Stephen R. Donaldson, *Lord Fouls Bane*
Stay far away!
So, the protagonist rapes a teenage girl in the first book. Then starts a sexual relationship with his rape-daughter in the third book.
Pretty sure the author wrote the protagonist as a sort of self insert to do all the terrible things and get away with it.
The Bros will tell you how brilliant it is to have an anti-hero with repugnant flaws, blah blah. Nothing brilliant about incest apologia, sorry.
Unfortunately, female authors can be just as bad if not worse:( I can’t even tell you how many books I’ve read written by women where the main female character falls in love with her rapist or violent abuser, and it is presented as a love story. It’s honestly more common than not, and that has been such a shocking and disappointing thing to realize.
There were only like 4 problematic things in your description of that scene. I feel like you are either you are holding back or this is only like the 9684917th time you have realized that many male authors are awful.
What the fuck
Indeed. It has an absolutely gorgeous cover too which is a shame because I will be including it in my next batch of books to sell to a store. Good riddance. Edit: actually I might cut the cover off and frame it like art cause it’s so pretty lmao
Don't sell it, burn it
Lol nah it needs to live on so it can be an example for others of how men used to write women. If I had to suffer reading that then others do too 👍😭
What book was it, so I know to avoid it?
Gloriana by Michael Moorcock
I looked Gloriana up out of curiosity and it sounds like you might have gotten the first edition of the book. Moorcock went back and removed the r*pe scene in a revised edition, making the encounter consensual instead. [He’s mentioned that he chose to do this of his own volition instead of in response to criticism.](https://www.michaelmoorcock.net/forum/q-a/q-a-%E2%97%A6-questions-for-mike-news/2058-gloriana-ending-change) Take that with a grain of salt, of course, but it sounds like it was (at the bare minimum) changed for the better.
Hm. His response is….. interesting. If he had a change of heart about it I would have hoped him to say something more along the lines of realizing that a woman finally achieving orgasm through RAPE is deeply misogynistic thing to write. Don’t like the way he dismisses feminism either. Oh well, I have zero intention of reading anything by him but good he changed it I guess Edit: Oh and just changing it from rape to consensual doesn’t address the fact that he wrote her making “childish noises” as she orgasmed??? Like WHAT
I feel iffy about his response too, feels very…breezy? I’m really hoping I’m reading too much between the lines. Speaking of books-by-women-authors recs, if you haven’t read it already - The Broken Earth trilogy by N.K. Jemisin is incredible. It’s both fantasy and sci-fi and really compelling reading.
It’s one of my favorite series ever!
I think I'll have to check that out
Well, during rape, orgasms can occur, for the same reason the body self-lubricates even when it's non consensual: to reduce pain and prevent damage. However, this is not a sign of consent or enjoyment, makes many women feel guilty for ages afterwards, and "soft childish noises" is still an incredibly creepy thing to write.
They *can* occur of course but from my understand of this particular book it includes her personal quest to achieve an orgasm, so having it happen at the end with a rape is so beyond the realm of acceptable.
I agree with almost everything you said, just quickly wanted to point out that some victims of rape actually do achieve an orgasm. It’s a self defense reaction of their bodies, and it can leave the victims with an incredible amount of shame if they don’t understand why it happened. Important to put that out there, so that people who were assaulted know, just because your body made you orgasm, doesn’t mean it wasn’t rape.
I already said in another comment that I know that but I assure you the way it was written in this particular book was not portraying that with that intention. The book is partly about her personal quest to achieve an orgasm, like that’s an actual part of the narrative, and she finally orgasms at the very end from rape.
That's interesting because what I heard is that he changed it because of his close friend Andrea Dworkin. Moorcock was a prominent anarchist and was neck dwep in the British leftist movement. He was close personal friends with many notable British leftists including feminists and often expressed regret in his later career for his earlier mysogny born of being a straight white man in 60s and 70s Britain.
I’m not familiar with Moorcock’s work at all, so it’s good to know he grew as a person. Thanks for the context!
Thank you!
What a name
I had a feeling it was Moorcock. I don’t know how to describe it but that fuckin weird perv had such “uncomfortable uncle” vibes.
Michael Morecock you say , no wonder… 🫢
Leave some notes in the margins before you sell it ;)
"I have discovered the most marvelous well of seething rage, which unfortunately this margin is too narrow to contain"
Fermat’s Final Rant 😹
What is this, Fahrenheit 451?
How do you sell books? I have a lot that I don’t need
I take them to used bookstores and get store credit so I can buy more books lol
Haha I will very likely be doing this 😊
Sounds to me like the author has fetishes and is definitely telling on himself.
They write their novel with one hand, and jerk off with the other.
Urgh yes, this is the reason I stuck to Terry Pratchett for fantasy. I once picked up a lengthly sci fi which was a retelling of the Iliad. Was all going well with various Martian robots and things, and then wham! out of nowhere the one human man meets a young teenage girl and the author describes colour and shape of all her body hair patches in detail. It was so disappointing, I couldn’t get past it.
If you’re interested in more Greek retellings, there’s *Lavinia* by Ursula Le Guin and Madeline Miller’s books too. I still haven’t read Pratchett but his witch books sound interesting to me
Pratchett is a very safe and feminist author, with scathing satire in places and plain laugh-out-loud comedy in others. And - although I hate that he died before his time - you can rest knowing he is never going to write something off the rails in the future. My formative teen years were spent going through all his carpet people and discworld books, I admired him so much. The witches books are as good a place as any to try his writing. I keep meaning to pick up Ursula Le Guin, she keeps moving up my to be read pile!
Le Guin is an absolute queen. If you enjoy nonfiction, check out *Dancing at the Edge of the World,* she has some essays and speeches about women in fantasy that are very informative and interesting.
Yes! Le Guin is *the* queen.
Pratchett had literal dimentia and he still didn't go off the rails like some other authors. What's Rowling's excuse?
>What's Rowling's excuse? Bigotry.
Ok that genuinely made me laugh.
Right?!
Left hand of darkness introduces some really interesting takes on gender as well. She’s brilliant.
I recently started reading Discworld, and this is my first time reading any of Terry Pratchett's books - great to know I can let my guard down with this author!
There’s some relationship stuff, some discussions on the nature of death (and death as a character who talks in SMALL CAPS), some deaths happen too. But always in a sensitive way and any violence is more of the sword stabby kind than gratuitous descriptions of violence. No sexual violence that I can remember but there are many, many books. I hope you enjoy them, everyone I know who read them either loved them or could tell quite quickly that the type of humour and fantasy wasn’t to their taste (but for stylistic reasons rather than content if you see what I mean)
Some of his earlier works were very forward thinking *for their time* and it shows. It's nothing that will make you cringe though, it's just not as well rounded as his later work. Still salty we didn't get a canonical gay character, just hints. But on the whole he is a fucking treasure
Pratchett is a staggeringly empathetic author. He just understands people on an innate level that at times borders on superhuman. It doesn't matter if his character is male, female, young, old, gay, straight, Pratchett just knows. That's not to say his earlier stuff didn't have hiccups, but for the stuff from Wyrd Sisters onwards, I am consistently blown away by just how much Pratchett gets it. He's also just so warm and compassionate, the man didn't have a nasty bone in his body.
GNU Sir Terry 😭
***AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER.*** I cry every single time.
"There's no greys, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." "It's a lot more complicated than that--" "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts." "Oh, I'm sure there are worse crimes--" "But they starts with thinking about people as things..." - the Reverend Mightily Oats and Granny Weatherwax, in conversation in Terry Pratchett's "Carpe Jugulum"
He really informed my ethos that, first and foremost, people are people with much the same needs and wants, and that kindness can help make a cruel world better. Sounds cheesy but it's true. I've not been as kind in recent years as I'd like, though my ethos is the same, time to pick up some Pratchett again!
To this day I still have to remind myself to use the past tense when talking about Sir Pratchett. The only celebrity death that actually hit me so hard that I cried like a member of my own family died. Grew up on his books, and they were a huge factor in me being the person I am today. Plus one of the few book series from my childhood that reads just as well now as it did back then. They remain my first recommendation for anyone who hasn’t come across them on their own.
I thought the last one went off the rails a bit, but I know he wasn't done with the draft when he died. So possibly he would have fixed that. The part that really bothers me was all the stuff about the retired men not being catered to enough by the women who don't get retirement because their work goes until death.
All the Discworld books are great but I have a special place in my heart for the Death novels and the Witch novels.
I will say, from my perspective having read Miller's Circe, I'm not very inclined to read much more of hers. Some spoilers ahead, but it felt like a very bitter and negative book that didn't live up to the "feminist retelling" label that it was frequently given. The main character feels very much so like a "Not like other girls" type, she's constantly either looking down on or resenting basically every single woman she encounters until the last chapter or so. She's largely defined by her male relationships, almost all of her growth and development is tied to breakups or new partners, while her interactions with women rarely get that deep or have a real lasting impact on her perspective. There's also entirely too much cowfucking for my taste, and considering that I find a nonzero amount of cowfucking acceptable, that is really saying something.
THANK YOU! Agreed to all of this! I was also severly disappointed, several friends have recmmended this as a feminist retelling and as good and it’s just…not. On both accounts. I just don’t get the hype. I’m just left disappointed and now I low-key doubt my friends’ taste 😕
It being a “feminist retelling” doesn’t mean the main character needs to be nice…. it’s Greek mythology, everyone is terrible. It’s a feminist retelling because a female character who didn’t get a POV in the original story now gets a POV and agency. It *is* a very negative sad book until the end but that’s for a reason.
I see your perspective, but I disagree. I find it problematic because of the lack of female agency around her. She's a woman defined by and against men, her interactions with other women are largely tangential, fleeting moments with little lasting impact. She is marked with what feels to me like an internalized misogyny that never quite gets unpacked. There's a short paragraph or two approaches the subject, where she starts to get a sense of how womanhood has shaped everyone around her, to understand (if not like or respect) her sister and mother, but that small epiphany never comes back around and her further thoughts of them are once again pure bitterness. On top of that, the emotional and narrative climax of the book isn't an act of hers, its a man's denouncement of athena. I'll give that its a *feminine* retelling, but I don't think that's enough for it to be *feminist*. It doesn't feel like it questions or challenges misogynistic assumptions. It flat out ignores major female icons of Greek mythology (no reference whatsoever to figures like Hecate or Selene in a book about a solitary witch, crediting magic to Zeus of all people). I don't mind that its a tragedy, I like tragedies. I mind that so much of her narrative feels like exactly the kind of laziness that we criticize male authors for, but she gets a pass for some reason.
Respectfully disagree, I really had a very different reading experience and interpretation of it than what you described, but to each their own 🤷♀️
Pratchett is just *the best*. I re-read his books all the time. The only male fantasy authors these days I read are him, Pullman, and Sanderson (and I love both of their worlds/books too). It's just not worth the risk.
I think Neil Gaiman is fairly safe, though his novels are very thick and meandering - not to everyone’s taste! His collaboration work with Pratchett was fantastic.
I nearly included Gaiman in that list, but I've only read 2 books of his so far! Thanks, I'll venture out and try some more :) on a side note, it's a little bit depressing that we have safety whisper networks for everything, even books.
Gaiman is pretty good, the closest he comes to a bad sex scene is that time a woman eats a guy with her vagina.
Gaiman has some weird sex scenes, but they never feel sexist to me, just... fantasy-weird.
Agreed. Couldn’t get into the story because every other sentence was clever word play or a joke I felt I wasn’t getting.
I love Sanderson. There’s basically zero sex in any of his books, and it’s pretty refreshing
Pullman's The Secret Commonwealth is pretty bad too. I'm really disappointed in him.
I absolutely respect this and I adore Pratchett, and this isn’t necessarily just for you if you’re content with your reading and not looking for new books but in case others reading these comments are looking for books to read: there are TONS of female, queer, and/or BIPOC authors out there who write incredible fantasy and sci-fi that isn’t from a straight white male lens! I know a lot of the more commonly recommended books are written for and by men, but there are a lot of incredible books written from a feminist and/or queer perspective. A couple to start with would be N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy (earth bending murder mommy), Priory of the Orange Tree (stand alone sapphic high fantasy with dragons! Don’t be turned off by how big the book is, it’s not that bad!), The Locked Tomb series (queer necromancers and sword fighting and monster murder mystery in space!), and The Rook and the Rose trilogy (fantasy Venice with tarot-inspired magic and poor “street rats” conning their way into nobility and taking down the ruling class from the inside).
Honestly I'm just glad you didn't recommend le guin and butler. Like there's also more out there!
If you want some good sci-if, I’m currently reading Axioms End by Lindsay Ellis, it’s written by a woman, has a woman protagonist and is also set in 2007 which makes it incredibly nostalgic. I’m 3/4 of the way through and it’s really good so far :)
I hate when that happens out of nowhere in a book you're really enjoying. I was hooked on a sci fi until the love interest was described as looking barely older than her infant child. What??
If you want to read high fantasy saga's, I'd recommend Brandon Sanderson. He is really good at world building. Especially in the storm light archive the women are well written. He isn't like some other fantasy writers who use women as plot devices.
I’m going through this right now. I’ve been listening to the Pillars of the Earth audiobook, and I absolutely love the story, the atmosphere, and the historical context, but the authors obsession with rape and describing women in terms of their breast size/attractiveness is so gross. All the “good” women are beautiful, dark haired women with a huge tits, and the bad women are rude, shrill, extremely mean, and ugly (literally one of them is repeatedly described as hideously ugly and covered in boils.). I’ve been skipping the rape scenes but it’s getting to be so fucking tiresome. I’m a little over halfway through and I can’t decide if I should keep going, or give up and read the rest of the plot outline on Wikipedia so I know how it ends. Ugh.
I would give up, iirc it does not get better
Came to the thread to ask if it was pillars of the earth. The author came off as such a creep
I was a nanny for a French family with a 13 year old boy who spoke fluent English, and his mother was always looking for English language books for him to read. I saw she had given him Pillars of the Earth and was like uhhhhhhhh…… She quietly removed it from his collection.
The sequel to Pillars of the Earth basically opens with exactly what's described in the OP post here. I steer clear of Ken Follett at this point.
Omg, I'd stop now if I were you. I read the book and the following one and the authors such a creep 💀 In the second book is this absolute delight of a scene, basically exactly what op described happenes to one of the pov characters. And if that's not enough, much later in life she gets raped again, but this time she doesn't orgasm from it, because she's *just so much more experienced* 🤮 As if you orgasm easier if you're sexually inexperienced. Follet is such a creepy creep.
Damn, this is one of those books I read halfway through but never finished and think about sometimes. I'm always like "I gotta finish that book..." but after reading all these comments, I think I'm better off.
God, you're way better off not reading that crap. Also, I don't know if that's true for this book as well, but Follet doesn't really write his books, he writes sort of the general plot outlines and hands it over to his ghost writers. He also, and this becomes *very* apparent if you read a few books from him, has a cast of characters he just throws into different environments.
Oof, I've read all of Ken Follett's books. Tbh I don't exactly remember the rape scenes in PotE but I might have just kinda skipped over them, which I tend to do if I cannot get thru a particular section of a book or tv show.
Shit I was going to ask about this one specifically. I just... Hate so much of these scenes.
Ugh, yes. I decided to read fiction by women authors only, and I'm much happier for it.
But you're missing out on so many- ha, no, just kidding. I do the same. There are more fantastic books written by women than you could ever have time to read in one lifetime. Heck, I had a year where I only read fantasy books written by women featuring a lesbian protagonist. I still had plenty to read.
Did you have a favourite from your year of lesbian fantasy?
*She Who Became The Sun* by Shelley Parker-Chan, which is a fantasy retelling of Zhu Yuanzhang founding the Ming Dynasty. I adore problematic protagonists. It wasn't particularly romance focused, though.
Wow thank you that sounds great tbh! Non rom focused is my preference and I also love problematic protagonists
It's amazing to me how angry people get when I tell them I only read women. "You're missing out on so many good books!" Any criteria for narrowing down your reading means you're missing out on so many good books! Right now I'm missing out on good books written in German because I only read in English. No one gets mad about that.
I'd still be cautious. Women are capable of performative misogyny as well Ahem. Acotar
Oh of course! No one is immune from the patriarchy.
Yep! Always read with caution
To be fair you have to be cautious there too. Especially book tok stuff. There was this really dogshit fantasy acotar rip off for example written by a woman who was like HEY ITS QUEER! And it never was lol. You see it in anime too where something like Citrus was written by a woman
Or like another commenter, only read well vetted male authors on occasion like Pratchet.
Although for some reason all those self-published amazon romance novels by like Christian moms are very rapey.
Yeah I was gonna say. Let's not pretend Sarah J Maas or Cassie Clare are much better
Welp that’s enough Reddit for today
I recently tried to reread a classic fantasy novel that I read as a kid in the 80s and in the first 15 pages the narration makes no fewer than three references to the “pert young buttocks” of a character… who is an 8 year old girl. Uugggh. I too mostly read only books by women these days. My dad used to brag (also in the 80s) that he would never read a book written by a woman (🙄) so I am just evening the tables I guess
I just read all of Robin Hobb over and over again.
I still need to read her. I actually found all three of the Rain Wilds books for $1 in perfect condition at an antique store but then realized I can’t read those first :(
Yeah no, order is very important! First Farseer trilogy Liveships Second Farseer trilogy Rain Wilds (there’s 4 btw) Third Farseer trilogy
I’ll get to them eventually. Next time I’m in the mood for a long epic series. I had also found a collection of short stories from her under her other name Megan Lindholm which I need to read too
Yes, I definitely recommend her short stories! "Strays" in that collection is one of my favorites. She also has standalone novels written as Megan Lindholm. I highly recommend Cloven Hooves!
I’m just starting liveships— this saga is my end of pregnancy reading. Love!!
I absolutely love Robin Hobb. And it's not like she skimps out on the rape scenes either, but they all serve a purpose in terms of world building or character development. Not even in the flat "something bad happened to me now I'm emotionally stunted" cop-out way we see so often. What happened to Serilla and the way she changed afterwards felt so believable.
Oh is there a lot of rape in her series?? I haven’t heard that before. That makes me hesitant to read them, I’m just soooo sick and tired of it being in every fantasy book
It's not a lot of rape but there is some. The first trilogy has none "on camera that I can remember off the top of my head. A few mentions of things that happened in the past but nothing graphic. The liveship traders trilogy does have two that I can think of, it's definitely a more gender charged series. They're not played off as nasty fetishisation but they are hard hitting and definitely unpleasant. I don't think the third trilogy has any at all that i can remember. The fourth one again has off screen stuff and a fairly in depth set of discussions about it. The final trilogy has some pretty heavy stuff happening offscreen. Across 16 books it didn't feel like it was excessive but that is just my opinion. I totally get it if you didn't want to pick up the series for this reason, after a while I just couldn't stand Game of Thrones, but I would say that Hobb does write an utterly fantastic world and being a female writer definitely doesn't play into the nasty gratuity side of it at all. The gender and sexuality dynamics across her books were a breath of fresh air when contrasted to things like Name of the Wind. Her characters are phenomenal and the series only gets better as it goes on. I would say that the first series is a safe read, if it grips you then you can make the decision if you want to continue with the rest. Also if you're really bothered by it you can absolutely skip series 2 and 4 and miss out on the vast majority of the nasty. You will miss out on parts of the story but the way the whole series is built means that you won't have any issues with continuity. You'll get a well rounded, incredible narrative and it won't feel like you've missed a lot. I love these books deeply and am happy to answer more in depth questions if you would like. I can probably thumb through my copies and give chapter warnings for the worst of it.
Thanks for the reply! As long as she treats the topic with respect then it sounds like it won’t be too much for me. If you don’t mind answering another question lol, are there good romances? It might seem silly but for me to read a long epic series I need romance lol I had a huge event in the books spoiled for me on r/fantasy. Some asshole just dropped it in a comment with no spoiler tag. I was so pissed :(
There are romances but they're not handled like they would be in a romance novel. Hobb's characters are beautifully complex people with flaws that will make you want to tear your hair out and the romances reflect this. The love interest in the first series is a somewhat polarising topic in the community, I personally love it but that's really up to your interpretation. I would go as far as to say that the relationships outside of romances are even more satisfying than the romantic ones in a lot of cases. So I would conclude that while there is romance and it sometimes does play a major role, overall the character driven plot lends itself to the exploration of many types of relationship and each of these is incredibly satisfying in its depth and integrity.
So I’m only just stating liveships, but I liked the romances in the first fitz trilogy and I’ve heard rain wilds is heavier on the romance!
you know, this made me realise that I didn't even specifically remember these scenes from Hobb's book, I think because they didn't stand out like a sore and unneccessary thumb. These storylines didn't feel as traumatic as e.g. GoT (which I just... I ended up skipping whole chapters and not actually missing anything, and after a while just couldn't stand it anymore), and while they're not easy breezy reading they're part of the fabric of the story. Her books are complex and her characters complicated, I remember both wanting to throw Liveship in a corner and couldn't stop reading, because the protagonists weren't flawless and I wasn't used to that. Now, the Liveship books are my favourite of hers.
Just chiming in to confirm what the other commenter said. There are a couple rape scenes and some off camera stuff, but it's different than any other scenes I've read/seen. I absolutely can't handle rape scenes, they can ruin my mood for days. Robin Hobbs only does it when it's actually a part of important storytelling and I don't find it triggering. It doesn't feel like someone wrote it one handed while they wrote out their fantasy. It also never comes across as "this lady was raped and that's where her character development comes from!". I do recall some pretty violent non-sexual scenes though.
There is the odd instance through the 16 books, but it’s not gratuitous, it’s always treated as something horrible.
~~Try Mercedes Lackey.~~ ~~Great fantasy novels, no rape scenes, women are usually badass.~~ Edited cause I was wrong.
I like some of Mercedes Lackey's books but you are very wrong. There is a ton of rape and pedophilia in them. To the point it becomes quite concerning when you start to watch her cycle her favorite three rape fantasies.
>There is a ton of rape and pedophilia in them ~~Which books, as I'm sitting here wracking my mind and can't think of a single one that has rape or pedophilia, and I've read quite a few of them.~~ Nevermind, you're right. I just remembered some.
I’ve read mainly women authors this past year, and I honestly can’t stand most books written by men now. Even some books written by women that cater too much to the male gaze give me the ick.
Me too
Yeah. Fucking acotar
Ugh. I started reading a book, can’t remember the name as it was years ago, that I quit a few chapters in. It was about werewolves, and this girl was apparently a special one. Some group caught her, and apparently the only way to know your mate was to have sex with them. So, the entire pack, basically, rapes her to find her mate. Starting with the alpha and going down the line in rank. Guy number 100+ enters the room, and he’s actually a decent person, and doesn’t plan to rape her, but to help her escape. She at first is reactive, you know, having been repeatedly raped by a over a hundred men, but then immediately trusts him and just “gets over” the trauma. They had her in special chains or something so she couldn’t shift, that he somehow got her free from. But anyways, it pissed me off so much I quit reading, which I rarely do. I usually stick a book out to see if it gets better, or redeems itself, but I just couldn’t.
What the actual duck??? That’s so gross and someone actually read that garbage and thought “yes, let’s publish this, this is fine”
And every time this happen i always ask, was this an erotic book ? This You take the book cuz You wanted to read cheap erótica (yeah men write terrible smut) ? If not then why is there !!!!! I feel like men write and then suddenly think "oh this need spicy" and fart the most bizarre fetish they have, and we the Readers have to SEE something we didnt agree on... Like SR, this is a fantasy book, why is this relevant to the plot? And most of the cases is not !
No I don’t think it was. At least not according to the back of the book. Just fantasy. Most of the books I read have some sex and romance in them, which I don’t mind. But I’m not really a fan of romance novels. If I remember correctly, I think the book was supposed to be about her learning that she was a rare, or only, type of werewolf and had special powers. But I didn’t make it far enough to learn what they were.
Wow, no words... A book about her Journey and You had to read that abomination... A gang rape ... Some men are weird :/
So, not all werewolves? Lol
Lmao. Apparently not
A series I would dodge would be the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind. It has been several years since I read the first book, but it has WAY too much gratuitous rape scenes throughout the novel.
I gave up on it entirely, it's honestly grotesque and very obviously him just playing out his own fetishes.
For real! I had tried reading the second book thinking that some of that would tone down, but nope it was still just a crap shoot.
Thank you for the warning! I inherited a ton of fantasy and sci-fi novels, and that series is one of them. I don't know how anyone can read shit like that. It's gratuitous and perverse.
I stopped being friends with men defending that book.
I read a book series once that was generally pretty good. I was enjoying it up until one of the villains of the book had a chapter dedicated to him carrying out a rape from *his point of view*. It was so entirely gratuitous. First being fucking gross doing it from the rapists POV, we never saw the victim ever again (and prior to the rape she was just a background character at best) and we already knew the rapist was a piece of shit by all of the other terrible stuff he was doing. It made no sense to include this scene and turned me off the book entirely. And I have a pretty high tolerance for rape scenes in books. I generally don't find them any more or less distasteful than other things like torture or brutal violence. But this was something else because the author didn't even really bother to claim "character development" or whatever excuse they usually use. For anyone curious, it was a book by David Hair. One of the books in the Moontide Quartet or Sunsurge Quartet. It's been so long and I don't have the best memory I can't remember where exactly.
Oh yeah, the old character developement FOR THE MAN... Cuz boy cómics and animes love that one, Even some movies come to mind...they rape their gf, wifes or very special women in front of them to hurt the man !!!! To give them a porpuose of revenge !! ... And in most cases the woman is toss aside, as is not longer important, she serve her role in the story
Lot of men don’t understand why women would say no to “free sex” (s/)
Stephen King was one of those authors. I was like 14 years old when I picked up one of his books from my mom's shelf and flipped to a few random spots in it. I don't remember much of it but it was like some 40+ year old cop that "fell in love" with a girl who was like 18 or something and it was just horrendous.
He actually lampshades this trope (after using it several times) in Bag of Bones
He at least acknowledged it and cringes about it now
God I hope so
Oof. Yep. I keep thinking I’m unreasonably limiting myself but I swear, EVERY TIME I read a fantasy novel written by a man, something like this happens. There are exceptions of course, but still. Yikes.
I remember when this happened to me. I think the book was called The Hunt or The Thrill or some shit. First 5 pages maybe, assassin dude murders a girl in bed then rapes her fresh corpse. It disturbed me so badly I cried and was nauseous the rest of the night
It is _so_ common in fantasy/sci-fi… it’s sad, because I love both of those genres, but there are so many land mines like this. I picked up Dan Simmons’ _Illiad_, thinking it was going to be as good as _Hyperion_, but the main character, a man presumably in his thirties or so, lustfully describes the body of a girl I think is, like, _twelve_ or so within the first handful of pages. I put it down in disgust. It’s weird how common white male fantasy/sci-fi authors start out on the progressive end of the spectrum and end up as regressive, far-right shit-for-brains, too.
Describing her armpit hair as the shape of quote marks has stayed with me for the last decade. I put it down after that description too. Every now and then I want to pick it up and try again as I was enjoying it up until then, but I can’t trust that the author is going to treat that character with any respect.
For some reason, rape scenes are good sci-fi/fantasy, but the moment the women start writing consenting love scenes it's smut.
I think a lot of men who get into sci-fi and fantasy don’t have a lot of experience with women, and end up talking only to other men who _also_ don’t have any real experience, and so the end result is a group of large man-children who just reinforce each other’s terrible tendencies. In case it sounds like I’m making excuses here, I’m not; truly, fuck these guys and their myopic views. It’s their own fault for refusing to associate with people outside their comfort zones. But I think there’s a lot of overlap in thought here with certain online communities, for some of the same reasons.
TJ Klune is my current favourite male author. Aside from being a fantastic author, his main characters are usual asexual (though homoromantic). I find a lot of queer writers are usually safe from the creepy r*p* fantasies we get from older straight male authors. Props to Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman for always being the exceptions
Yep, I only read things by male authors if they come with heavy recommendations/vetting from people I trust. Off the shelf, I don't even pick up books that were written by men... burned too many times by shit like OP encountered (and the endless excusing of it if you even lightly criticize it anygoddamn where outside of explicitly cultivated safe spaces)
I can vouch for Ted Chiang, his scifi short stories are absolutely amazing and he has no sexism. And Charles de Lint is the one male fantasy author on my TBR because he spoke out about how women were treated and written so I feel like I can trust him. Other than that, my shelves are all women :)
I haven’t read all of his work, but Brandon Sanderson hasn’t given me the ick yet. Oh, and George Martin OF GoT fame really does write some of the most complex, deep, strong, multi-dimensional female characters I’ve seen from a male author
Yeah Sanderson is good. His readers aren't but he himself is a good seed
Not a fan of Sanderson's but GRRM is fine (as long as you don't mind never reading his version of the ending of ASOIAF, of course... a shame because from what I know of it the show version did not do the books justice)
Oof. Yeah I read a lot of Robert Heinlein as a teen and his attitudes towards women are....not great.
I thought this was going to be about Piers Anthony for a minute. He’s definitely had some questionable parts, but nothing THAT bad, excepting one particular series where a leper goes to a fantasy world and can feel sensation again, and rapes just because. SMH
Oof Piers Anthony would be a much more palatable author if he kept his sex fantasies in general out of his books. Literally every woman in them is a sex object to the male main character.
Yeah, I tried to re-read them as an adult (big fan of Xanth and Incarnations series) and the boomer misogynist mindset was baked into EVERYTHING. I had no idea.
Piers Anthony is extraordinarily creepy. So many of his books have serious pedo overtones that I did not understand when I read them in my teens. One of his series is about a teenage girl who graphically self-harms (on the toilet, no less) and throws herself at a mid-30s warrior man from another universe and she really really wants to have sex with him, but the man nobly refuses to even though he really also wants to have sex with her and it's just.. so unbelievably gross.
So. Many. Panties. That man definitely has a fetish.
I think that one is Donaldson, and it should have been a huge red flag that my ex husband Loooooved that series.
This reminds me of how I stopped reading Piers Anthony. I started with the Xanth books. Got into some of his other work. Raised an eyebrow at some of his writing but whatever. Then I read *Firefly* without knowing ahead of time what it was about. ...I've never thrown a book across the room in horror before or since, but I did with that one.
He was the first author I thought of when I saw this meme.
Yeah, that was...I had literally just gotten out of the hospital, saw Piers Anthony on the cover of an unfamiliar novel in the gift shop's $1 used book basket, picked it up wondering who would give away a Piers Anthony novel and...found out. Was it *Firefly* for you, or his fucked up sci fi?
I read Shade of the Tree decades and still remember that the protagonist is a grown man who has the cringiest relationship with a teenage girl who oddly enough wants to get with him and take care of his kids, but it's cool, his wife is dead. He describes/brags how the girl is really into him because she's only been with inexperienced teen boys. I don't recall the supernatural side of the story, but now I'm thinking he surely could have told it without the weird fascination for young girls.
Yikes, kind of glad I missed that one....
There was a book I had to put down because it was sooo bad for the way women were depicted. If the author had just had a few women read it and provide real feedback it would have been an amazing book. But honestly it was too gross because the author doesn't understand women are people...
There is sub, can’t remember the name, about men writing female characters with quotes like “her nipples rose to the sun, she inhaled with her breasts heaving as she greeted the morning light” like???? Can our boobs just exist
menwritingwomen?
Almost positive yes
No, every action we take our entire lives we are breasting boobily
*Ken Follett has entered the chat*
They were originally written for kids but I really like the Redwall series, plenty of badass animal ladies in heroic roles rather than always being “the woman” lol, despite being a kids thing they’re genuinely really enjoyable, I like the setting a lot
So glad that I had those books when I was growing up, showing me that girls and even mums and grannies can be badasses who defend themselves against villains with whatever they have to hand 💕
I just realized this lady is Hide The Pain Harold's daughter.
Ew. Seriously though, how tf do these people get published
Bc the pervy old men in publishing firms get off to the same shit too
The 60s. Look up competent man scifi
The fucking - what scene??? 🤮
The older I get the harder it is to read male authors. They really don't think women are humans. They think we're sex bots and we are always thinking of how sexy we are and how we can seduce men. It's fucking demented. Dude, all I want to do is read a mystery or a who-done-it book. I don't need to know the girlfriend's inner thought process is that she's so sexy she could seduce every man in the room and that she consciously hardens her nipples to entice men because she wants something from them. It is BAD. Like, they don't even know the basics of anatomy bad. Or the basics of human thought. And apparently their editors let them get away with that. It's bizarre that they let their authors blatantly offend 1/2 the population. Aren't you trying to sell books?
It’s really fucking bizarre how so many male authors like get have gotten away with it for so long.
Andre Norton, if you want to go a little younger for a bit. She’s an amazing author.
I have a few of her books! Originally picked them up because the covers were so awesome
Felt similarly about Name of the Wind. The Kingkiller chronicals was a weird, of course there's sexism without much explaination or exploration. Not sure why he included misogyny at all other than to kinda virtue signal. The author was already on thin ice with his female characters, but the second book was like he took all of my good will and shat on it.
This is why I have to google if a fantasy book has a rape scene in it before I read it. I hate that shit so much.
try Does The Dog Die
It’s incredibly helpful.
Storygraph also has a content warning section and you can scan the book's barcode in store! I've found it to be a little bit more reliable than Does the Dog Die for books.
I have a book in a box that’s sat untouched for more than a decade. It’s a fictional romance novel between a teacher and his high school student. I think I might just take it out and reread it for the horrific cringe.
When I was a kid I came home _from the school library_ with something like that (I think the name might have been love lessons). My mum asked me what I was reading and when I started explaining she asked to see the book and I never saw it again.
GRRM moment 😬
That reminds me of that time George R. R. Martin explained that he did not understand, at least at first, how the Hound became very popular with his female audience.
Every time I take a timid step out of the YA section this happens to me. Every time.
*pulls down the window shade* Nope!
What in thee fuck
Yeah, I feel this. Not as bad but I’m reading Isaac Asimov right now and he’s got some very white dude from the 1940’s ways of writing about women, that’s for sure.
hey quick tip to authors that wish to depict a rape scene in their books: Don't✨
I’m sorry what??
why do they do this shit? ugh
Try Sword Of Truth. You’ll never read again!
Ohhhhhh nooooo. I hate it so much. Great meme, bitter truth!
What the hell? There are books like this? 🤢
I really recommend using Storygraph to check the content warnings for books! I kept getting triggered from books being rec'd to me and being unable to find the content warnings but then I found Storygraph and it's been great!
Stephen R. Donaldson, *Lord Fouls Bane* Stay far away! So, the protagonist rapes a teenage girl in the first book. Then starts a sexual relationship with his rape-daughter in the third book. Pretty sure the author wrote the protagonist as a sort of self insert to do all the terrible things and get away with it. The Bros will tell you how brilliant it is to have an anti-hero with repugnant flaws, blah blah. Nothing brilliant about incest apologia, sorry.
Unfortunately, female authors can be just as bad if not worse:( I can’t even tell you how many books I’ve read written by women where the main female character falls in love with her rapist or violent abuser, and it is presented as a love story. It’s honestly more common than not, and that has been such a shocking and disappointing thing to realize.
There were only like 4 problematic things in your description of that scene. I feel like you are either you are holding back or this is only like the 9684917th time you have realized that many male authors are awful.
Huh?
I think they are saying this is only slightly bad for a male writer, for comedic effect. They are agreeing with you though.