Eccentric Flower:199904/more pseudoliterary musings
From Eccentric Flower
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april twenty-ninth more pseudoliterary musings This isn't the postcard I thought I'd be writing tonight. That'll come in due time. After I wrote the previous postcard, I received several pertinent emails about books, and the value of having my opinions on them. Thanks for the support; however I may not be able to shake this phobia for a while. Iain-Padraic noted in a message from a few days ago: OK, a pet peeve, and I hope you don't feel insulted: I do wish you'd stop treating your opinions as irrelevant. I mean, we're reading this, right? We're writing to you, right? I replied: My opinions are irrelevant. Mind you, I continually whine because I don't get enough feedback (read:opinions) on my stories, and I certainly am interested in people's opinions on various and sundry as expressed in journals, emails, et cetera ... which means my standards are double. Isn't that a surprise, eh? - - - Iain-Padraic and Melissa both were all too willing to discuss Robin McKinley with me. Melissa, like everyone else but me, likes The Hero and the Crown better than The Blue Sword; she wants to be Aerin, I want to be Hari (both of those are female characters, in case you haven't read the books). I wrote Melissa: Basically it's because I was the tall, gawky, distant, not-of-this-earth tomboy, and not the vivacious, I'll-keep-trying-until-someone-takes-me-seriously tomboy. Okay, I wasn't a tomboy, but you get the idea. Hari in The Blue Sword is tall, unladylike, and finds her world boring and dissatisfying; however, her sense of duty prevents her from escaping it. She has to get kidnapped (under circumstances I find somewhat erotic, which helps) in order to realize where she truly fits in and what she excels at. And excel she does. This is the same reason I like Robin McKinley's book Beauty. Beauty knows she's unattractive and she pointedly misses any hints that she's wrong. She doesn't fit in well with her world. Eventually she finds a world where she belongs. Unfortunately McKinley has to undermine this by having Beauty be wrong - she has turned lovely as she grew and just hasn't realized it, but everyone else has. Scarred more than she cared to admit by being the "ugly daughter" (her name was wishfully given), she denies her beauty. As the Beast says to her, "You suffer from the oddest misapprehensions about your appearance." I don't believe it when people say it to me, and I wish Beauty hadn't believed it either. There's got to be some refuge for those of us who know how ugly we really are, no matter what other eyes say. - - - I hate it when a character is cajoled or finally persuaded into doing The Right Thing, even though it goes completely against their grain, and the author is on the opposite side of the dispute from the character. Since I always side with the character, it's as if the author is slapping me in the face with it as well. I have already mentioned here how much I hate the end of Time Pressure by Spider Robinson for that reason. So what if the hero's doing the Right Thing? He should have stuck to his convictions and brought the whole thing crashing down. I was rereading Crystal Line by Anne McCaffrey tonight, and as I did, I remembered why I hadn't reread it since I purchased it - even though I read the first two Crystal Singer books about once a year; I adore them. Killashandra should have continued to do it the old way, never forgiven Lars, stayed in the ranges, slowly losing her mind and fading into senility, maybe taking the whole Guild with her. Actually, it's the "forgiving Lars" part I object to most. It's not that I believe in stubbornly hewing to one's principles, even when they're wrong ... it's that when someone tells me "swallow this, it's for your own good," my reponse is to slap the spoon out of their hand and close my lips together tightly. It's funny how I can be waiting for my prince to come and show me where I belong; yet when someone tries to steer me in that direction, I tend to resist, as if ashamed that I couldn't find the path to that world on my own.
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