Goodkind is one of those extremely rare authors who have written books that I read and regretted reading when looking back at it from the distance of a few years. I mean seriously, the sex stuff goes too far with no good reason in those books, and there just isn't enough actual substance to support that.
I feel the same way.
Its interesting to note that with Wizard's First Rule, I remember thinking that the main character's capture and torture that took up most of the last third of the book was the best part of the novel.
It wasn't that I found it particularly engaging. It was, at best, fan-fiction level PG-13 bondage erotica.
What it was, was different from the formulaic fantasy novel I'd read up to that point. It was unexpected given the nature of the rest of the book, and I liked that.
Then, it drug on and on and ended with "and then my love-sword wins" (a facepalm-worthy metaphor if ever there was one).
As for Martin, the things that always stick out at me when I read people's critiques of his books is that for the most part, these people need to look up the word "deconstruction" and then need to do a little research into what the 12th century was actually like.
And yeah...Goodkind starts out okay.
The mind always boggles at this. WIZARDS' FIRST RULE is easily one of the very worst fantasy novels ever written. The second book, which I dropped halfway through, was even worse. Reading plot summaries of the rest of the series, it was clear that it somehow managed to go even more downhill.
However, it is apparently amusingly effective if you read the books with the viewpoint that Richard and Kahlan are the villains. Read in that light, they seem to make a hell of a lot more sense than they do if read straight.
And yeah...Goodkind starts out okay.The mind always boggles at this. WIZARDS' FIRST RULE is easily one of the very worst fantasy novels ever written. The second book, which I dropped halfway through, was even worse. Reading plot summaries of the rest of the series, it was clear that it somehow managed to go even more downhill.
Well...I did read it in high school...I can't say my literary palette was all that sophisticated then.
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I really don't think there is solid ground to argue that the book has a rape problem.
Really?
The abundant rape in the book is not used to take away agency from the female characters or as a cheap "big character moment" kind of thing. It is used on characters ranging from minor to unnamed, by villains, the same villains who also come up with incredibly vile ways to kill both males and females. In other words, it is used for the most part to help provide the grim tone of the novels.
That is a problem. Not only the completely accurate use of the word "abundant", which is problematic, but also that rape is used as cheap window dressing to make the setting look grim. Rape shouldn't be taken so lightly that it's scenery.
I also disagree with your assessment that rape doesn't take away agency from a female character. Being forced to experience something one does not consent to is a loss of agency, so pretty much by definition rape entails a loss of agency.
This is a bit off topic though, as well as something that is likely to get personal very quickly, so I'll avoid responding further.
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I really don't think there is solid ground to argue that the book has a rape problem.Really?
The abundant rape in the book is not used to take away agency from the female characters or as a cheap "big character moment" kind of thing. It is used on characters ranging from minor to unnamed, by villains, the same villains who also come up with incredibly vile ways to kill both males and females. In other words, it is used for the most part to help provide the grim tone of the novels.That is a problem. Not only the completely accurate use of the word "abundant", which is problematic, but also that rape is used as cheap window dressing to make the setting look grim. Rape shouldn't be taken so lightly that it's scenery.
I also disagree with your assessment that rape doesn't take away agency from a female character. Being forced to experience something one does not consent to is a loss of agency, so pretty much by definition rape entails a loss of agency.
This is a bit off topic though, as well as something that is likely to get personal very quickly, so I'll avoid responding further.
Just as a clarification, I didn't mean that rape doesn't take away agency from the victim, I said that in A Song of Ice and Fire, rape is not used to take away agency from the main female characters (because after all they simply don't get raped, except for Daenerys who literally takes her agency back before the rape even starts).
And, look... people get raped, murdered, looted, humiliated and maimed in a time of war. It certainly is that way in reality (it's like that now and it used to be worse), and A Game of Thrones is an exaggerated image of reality - the Boltons, Gregor Clegane and his men, Vargo Hoat and the Brave Companions are all monstrous on a scale to rival some of history's most notorious bad guys, and they all happen to Westeros at once. Honestly, having these people hang about in these circumstances and ignoring that they really are very likely going to rape a lot of women (as well as kill maim and torture a lot of men and women) would have hurt the believability.
So, anyway, I feel like the rapes in A Game of Thrones are not misplaced, are more than window dressing, are used intelligently and not as a cheap motivator for the main female characters (again, rape only motivated men so far in the story), and I also feel that the claim that there is more rape in the books than in the show is not unlike the idea that China is more democratic than the U.S because more people vote there every elections.
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Well...I did read it in high school...I can't say my literary palette was all that sophisticated then.And yeah...Goodkind starts out okay.The mind always boggles at this. WIZARDS' FIRST RULE is easily one of the very worst fantasy novels ever written. The second book, which I dropped halfway through, was even worse. Reading plot summaries of the rest of the series, it was clear that it somehow managed to go even more downhill.
Yeah, read 'em in high school too. I think I also quit halfway through the fourth book.
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That is a problem. Not only the completely accurate use of the word "abundant", which is problematic, but also that rape is used as cheap window dressing to make the setting look grim. Rape shouldn't be taken so lightly that it's scenery.
Because it is offensive to genteelized western audiences, despite being utterly in keeping with everything we have relating to the historical record?
I understand that for many sexual violence is a sensitive subject. Historically it wasn't, especially in time of war. Rape of defeated peoples was part and parcel to warfare for much of history, and the voices that argued against it were both meek and exceptional indeed. Even when criminalized by international or military law, the tendency even in western militaries was to look the other way when their soldiers committed rapes against hostile civilian populations. One need look no further than the good old boys of the 'greatest generation' in the US, who during World War II raped thousands and thousands of Japanese and German women during and immediately after the war (with relatively little recourse), to see the paltriness with which it was regarded. And they were (arguably) on the better end of it. The Rape of Nanking stands out as a particular atrocity during the same period, to say nothing of the pervasive use of sexual violence even in the modern era. Whether it's reports coming out of Syria and Iraq presently, or tales from Sudan in the early 2000s, rape and war go hand in hand.
Any book set in a pre-modern setting that includes war and doesn't have rape as window dressing to it is playing with kid gloves. Even even those thereafter that fail to touch on it are painting a rosy picture.
It's horrible, and it's disgusting, but it's there.
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While looking up a book by Bradley P. Beaulieu, if all things, I ran into a link to this.
The reviews are fantastic.
Contributor
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While looking up a book by Bradley P. Beaulieu, if all things, I ran into a link to this.
The reviews are fantastic.
You are not wrong. ^_^
GRRM wrote more about this subject on his blog than The Winds of Winter