It just seems misleading
Apr. 21st, 2012 10:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chocolatepotI find it interesting that this recent ONTD post on fic has a picture of JKR with the text "is fan-fiction 'the lazy way out'?" on the LJ main page spotlight ad, when the actual post has GRRM saying it and JKR easily the most sane and knowledgeable (sorry, you do not "lose your copyright" if people impinge on it, OSC) of the lot.
FitzOsbornes in Exile came in at the library. A few things are annoying me (everything I read annoys me to some extent these days, so these are hardly dealbreakers, but I have to say them). For one thing, it seems really odd to me that they'd need to have a conversation about the order of ranks in the English peerage and how titles are different than last names for any reason other than the reader's benefit. Aunt Charlotte bothers me as well, less because her opinions on proper behavior are anachronistic (as I sometimes feel with Regency books) and more because she's just such a stock character. I swear she's the same Aunt Charlotte as in Sorcery & Cecilia. And she doesn't have to be! Right after Sophie reports that she thinks all young ladies need to learn to ride to get a husband - she kind of implies aristocratic women were racing competitively and playing polo, which, uh, okay - she then exposits about how Aunt Charlotte raises racing horses, so it would have been so easy to write her as thinking riding was necessary because Horses Are The Best. (Also, I'm sort of confused as to why she's the Princess Royal when it seems like she would have had to give up the title as soon as Veronica was born?) IDK, it just gets a bit wearying when every gently-reared young heroine has to have an aunt obsessed with proper behavior for the sake of proper behavior. Surely a few could have kindly ones who are gently scandalized at their ways instead, or the type that spend all of their time doing heavy-duty gardening/dog breeding/church-bazaar-organizing.
But I suspect what is the most irritating to me is that so many things that are jumping out as Standard Historical YA Heroine Characteristics, like her needing to learn all the ~ways of society~, being kind of overlooked, being unable to hold graceful conversations, being in awe of all of the more capable characters, and having a somewhat bland and humble first person voice, are things that also feature in a very on-and-off WIP of my own that I started at 17 and probably last touched last year. It was originally diary format as well, but when I decided to make my third go-back-to-the-beginning-and-revise-before-writing-any-more I made it chaptered, but in first person. So on the one hand it's kind of a I Am What I Hate situation where I want to go back through the story again and purge it of these elements or at least make them seem different in some way, but on the other, since I see that I wrote them in because they were so prevalent in YA that I was kind of ... "fooled into thinking they were good" sounds pretentious, but there is definitely more than a pinch of "when you read a lot of similar books in one genre, you can start thinking some things are cooler than they are". With a dash of "at least I had the excuse of being 17"? I'm not saying nobody should write heroines with these characteristics, but when I can look at my original file from 2005 and my heroine could seriously be Sophie in an AU, there is an issue.
Veronica is awesome and I want to smack everyone for not adoring her properly. SHE IS DEPRESSED, PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK AN ILLEGITIMATE COMMONER HAS A CLOSER CLAIM TO THE THRONE THAN SHE DOES, IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING KING, TOBY, REPEAL THE SALIC LAW AND LET HER DO IT.
FitzOsbornes in Exile came in at the library. A few things are annoying me (everything I read annoys me to some extent these days, so these are hardly dealbreakers, but I have to say them). For one thing, it seems really odd to me that they'd need to have a conversation about the order of ranks in the English peerage and how titles are different than last names for any reason other than the reader's benefit. Aunt Charlotte bothers me as well, less because her opinions on proper behavior are anachronistic (as I sometimes feel with Regency books) and more because she's just such a stock character. I swear she's the same Aunt Charlotte as in Sorcery & Cecilia. And she doesn't have to be! Right after Sophie reports that she thinks all young ladies need to learn to ride to get a husband - she kind of implies aristocratic women were racing competitively and playing polo, which, uh, okay - she then exposits about how Aunt Charlotte raises racing horses, so it would have been so easy to write her as thinking riding was necessary because Horses Are The Best. (Also, I'm sort of confused as to why she's the Princess Royal when it seems like she would have had to give up the title as soon as Veronica was born?) IDK, it just gets a bit wearying when every gently-reared young heroine has to have an aunt obsessed with proper behavior for the sake of proper behavior. Surely a few could have kindly ones who are gently scandalized at their ways instead, or the type that spend all of their time doing heavy-duty gardening/dog breeding/church-bazaar-organizing.
But I suspect what is the most irritating to me is that so many things that are jumping out as Standard Historical YA Heroine Characteristics, like her needing to learn all the ~ways of society~, being kind of overlooked, being unable to hold graceful conversations, being in awe of all of the more capable characters, and having a somewhat bland and humble first person voice, are things that also feature in a very on-and-off WIP of my own that I started at 17 and probably last touched last year. It was originally diary format as well, but when I decided to make my third go-back-to-the-beginning-and-revise-before-writing-any-more I made it chaptered, but in first person. So on the one hand it's kind of a I Am What I Hate situation where I want to go back through the story again and purge it of these elements or at least make them seem different in some way, but on the other, since I see that I wrote them in because they were so prevalent in YA that I was kind of ... "fooled into thinking they were good" sounds pretentious, but there is definitely more than a pinch of "when you read a lot of similar books in one genre, you can start thinking some things are cooler than they are". With a dash of "at least I had the excuse of being 17"? I'm not saying nobody should write heroines with these characteristics, but when I can look at my original file from 2005 and my heroine could seriously be Sophie in an AU, there is an issue.
Veronica is awesome and I want to smack everyone for not adoring her properly. SHE IS DEPRESSED, PEOPLE SEEM TO THINK AN ILLEGITIMATE COMMONER HAS A CLOSER CLAIM TO THE THRONE THAN SHE DOES, IF YOU DON'T LIKE THE IDEA OF BEING KING, TOBY, REPEAL THE SALIC LAW AND LET HER DO IT.
