Life and books
Aug. 25th, 2011 12:46 pmI've been in a really fantastic mood recently, I feel really optimistic and comfortable in my skin. It is VERY STRANGE.
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emma_in_dream came over with her kids today which was great, I was a bit too sleepy to be very good conversation but there was much discussion of My Little Pony and eating of cherries and it was very nice.
Yesterday I decided to take a break from "Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn". She's deconstructing typical fantasy heroine by having a couple of female characters who are convinced that they are oppressed special snowflakes who Deserve To Be Saved From All This and slowly learn responsibility and perspective. Their journey can be painful to watch, especially since Fuyumi Ono is sometimes heavy handed with both the oppression they experience and the "Stop feeling sorry for yourself" rhetoric.
Random internet clicking led me to Demon Princess. And it sounds very silly and way too porny for me, but...cross dressing lesbians! Morally ambiguous demon women who Learn to Care! Sacrifice for the greater good!
So to distract myself I read The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer, a lesbian retelling of Hades and Persephone that I'd heard was good.
...and in this Persephone really is an oppressed special snowflake who Deserves To Be Saved From All This. She's nice enough, but spends the middle portion of the book being incredibly passive and dull with absolutely no life goals beyond pining after Hades (she is slightly more interesting by the end) It's the sort of romance where everything revolves around the two main characters and their feelings for each other, (eg the mortals are oppressed, but they're stupid helpless ingrates who just show how nice Hades is for helping them anyway) that's not my sort of thing but it's ok for the genre. The deconstruction of mythology was ok and certainly fit what I know of Greek myth, you don't have to deconstruct very much for Zeus to be a bad guy. Be warned the story includes both rape and attempted incest.
emma_in_dream came over with her kids today which was great, I was a bit too sleepy to be very good conversation but there was much discussion of My Little Pony and eating of cherries and it was very nice.Yesterday I decided to take a break from "Twelve Kingdoms: Skies of Dawn". She's deconstructing typical fantasy heroine by having a couple of female characters who are convinced that they are oppressed special snowflakes who Deserve To Be Saved From All This and slowly learn responsibility and perspective. Their journey can be painful to watch, especially since Fuyumi Ono is sometimes heavy handed with both the oppression they experience and the "Stop feeling sorry for yourself" rhetoric.
Random internet clicking led me to Demon Princess. And it sounds very silly and way too porny for me, but...cross dressing lesbians! Morally ambiguous demon women who Learn to Care! Sacrifice for the greater good!
So to distract myself I read The Dark Wife by Sarah Diemer, a lesbian retelling of Hades and Persephone that I'd heard was good.
...and in this Persephone really is an oppressed special snowflake who Deserves To Be Saved From All This. She's nice enough, but spends the middle portion of the book being incredibly passive and dull with absolutely no life goals beyond pining after Hades (she is slightly more interesting by the end) It's the sort of romance where everything revolves around the two main characters and their feelings for each other, (eg the mortals are oppressed, but they're stupid helpless ingrates who just show how nice Hades is for helping them anyway) that's not my sort of thing but it's ok for the genre. The deconstruction of mythology was ok and certainly fit what I know of Greek myth, you don't have to deconstruct very much for Zeus to be a bad guy. Be warned the story includes both rape and attempted incest.
