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Jul. 13th, 2007 02:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rivendellroseI usually shoot to avoid potential wank, but... this time, I just can't restrain myself.
Laurell K. Hamilton speaks on herbloated obnoxious porn series Anita Blake books as compared to Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
I read the first five or six Anita Blake books one summer. I was amused by them. I got bored and annoyed around the point at which... hmm, I guess it was when she vilified whats-his-name Anita's werewolf former boyfriend and the were pack politics (and/ie, sex) became the most important thing in the book. The rest of the pile sat around my room for a few months, and then I returned them to my then-boyfriend who'd loaned them to me. Yawn, blah, end of story.
Except, of course, for the endless wanks this woman causes on her blog and such. Seriously, it's like she's trying to be the next Anne Rice, and if she can't manage it by author-superstardom, she'll do it by wankiness. This is a woman who claimed on her blog that anyone under a size 6 (I think it was 6? Could someone correct/confirm?) was not a person.
Obviously, I was not a fan of that statement. The answer to fat- or size-phobic tendencies in pop culture is not to vilify or dehumanize those of us who are small. :P
Anyway. A few quotes and my responses to her comments in this interview...
"Well, one, I pre-date Buffy by a number of years. Two, Anita started out at 24. She's legal for everything."
This is how she starts. Before I deal with the details of what she's saying, let me just nit for a sec. See, I must be behind the times. I was under the impression that it was still polite practice, when one artist is asked to compare his/her work to that of another artist in the same field, to say something to the effect of "of course I respect so-and-so's work very much," or "of course, who-and-what did such an interesting thing with blah..." It does not matter if you intend to totally waste the person's work in your next sentence - there is still Protocol to be followed. One may, for instance, take the tack of Sir Ian McKellan when asked about Christopher Lee in one of the LotR commentaries, and say something about all the many many many movies the other artist has made... and then slyly say (I paraphrase!) "of course, even he would agree that they weren't all good."
See, that's how a true master makes a vague slight in the direction of a 'rival.' And of course the big trick is to never once indicate that you are dealing with a situation of actual rivalry or even potential to be compared at all... But I digress.
First, I have no idea why she would say that she pre-dates Buffy except in some odd attempt to jump up and down and attempt to claim that SHE DID IT FIRST DAMN IT. To which I say, please. Tons of people have written this kind of story. Nobody particularly cares who did it first.
On the subject of age, she seems to have missed the whole point of Buffy... which was that she was a teenager. As far as I can tell, it's less impressive to see a twenty-something PI saving the world from vampires (something I'm not actually convinced Anita does - I can't remember her actually killing more than two or so vampires in the books that I read... and none of them seemed all that terribly dangerous, particularly not to anybody outside whatever small town they were in at the time. But I might not be remembering correctly, as it's been a while) than to see a teenager trying to live a normal, everyday life and save the world from vampires and other creepy-crawly-demony-thingies. Honestly, if Buffy had been a vampire slayer by intentional vocation, I don't think I'd have been interested. The whole point for me was watching a normal teenager try to cope with the immense responsibility that had been plopped down in her lap.
"...At the beginning of the series, vampires are monsters to Anita. She has no problem killing them. As the series progresses, she begins to question whether she's killing another person who just happens to be a vampire."
She seems to be trying to say that this wasn't an issue that Buffy had... which is just plain wrong-headed, as near as I can tell. Like Anita, Buffy falls in love with a vampire. (At least I'm assuming that Anita was in love with Jean-Claude. I don't actually remember much emotion other than lust...) She comes to respect Spike, another vampire, and is friends with Anya, who used to be a demon. Multiple times over the course of the series a point is made that Buffy doesn't always know who the enemies are - that things aren't as clear-cut as they're "supposed" to be or as she'd like them to be. Demons, werewolves, vampires... all frequently come out seeming very 'human.'
"Another big difference for Anita and her world is that sex is not a bad thing. You don't get punished instantly. If Buffy's universe, if you have sex, really horrible things happen to you. It's like that old horror cliche that only the virgin will survive."
I do tend occasionally to agree with this gripe about Joss-verse, however, I also recognize that Joss was attempting to parallel horror cliches (sex gets girl in trouble) with teenage fears (a guy who seems fantastic suddenly "changes" after the girl has sex with him). Also, Buffy was intended as a play on horror themes and cliches. That was kind of the whole point of the show. And not every instance of sex leads to something bad, even indirectly. ...Just sex with Angel. :P
"in many ways, Anita's world is bigger than Buffy's. There's a wider variety of monsters on a regular basis. I know there are other monsters like werewolves, but they never played that big of a part. I know there were occasionally other monsters aside from vampires, but primarily it was a vampire series. Anita's world covers every kind of shape-shifter I could find in folklore."
And that wouldn't at all be because it's called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," now, would it?
Cheap shot, I know. But seriously.
And in any case, I think that if I went through all the episodes of Buffy, it would probably turn out that other monsters figured just as frequently, if not more often, as vampires. We've got bug-teachers, demons of all sorts of kinds, egg-laying-things, trolls, the Gentlemen, ghosts, robots, Adam-the-weird-Terminator-thing, zombies, Frankenstein-style monsters... everything. Her claim of dealing with "every kind of shape-shifter I could find in folklore" comes down, for me at least, to "I have Anita *screw* every animal I could possibly turn into a sexy furry." I admit that my memory of the later books in particular is a bit dim, but I remember nothing at all impressive or unique about her folkloric research or usage.
All in all... if she was trying to make Anita (and, by extension, herself - nobody could miss how much Anita is an idealized insert of Hamilton, I think) look awesome, as far as I'm concerned she ends up just looking immature, petty, and ill-informed.
...Also, she just pitted herself against one of the biggest and most infamously vocal sections of fandom. I'll be interested to see how long it takes for that to bite her in the butt. :>
Laurell K. Hamilton speaks on her
I read the first five or six Anita Blake books one summer. I was amused by them. I got bored and annoyed around the point at which... hmm, I guess it was when she vilified whats-his-name Anita's werewolf former boyfriend and the were pack politics (and/ie, sex) became the most important thing in the book. The rest of the pile sat around my room for a few months, and then I returned them to my then-boyfriend who'd loaned them to me. Yawn, blah, end of story.
Except, of course, for the endless wanks this woman causes on her blog and such. Seriously, it's like she's trying to be the next Anne Rice, and if she can't manage it by author-superstardom, she'll do it by wankiness. This is a woman who claimed on her blog that anyone under a size 6 (I think it was 6? Could someone correct/confirm?) was not a person.
Obviously, I was not a fan of that statement. The answer to fat- or size-phobic tendencies in pop culture is not to vilify or dehumanize those of us who are small. :P
Anyway. A few quotes and my responses to her comments in this interview...
"Well, one, I pre-date Buffy by a number of years. Two, Anita started out at 24. She's legal for everything."
This is how she starts. Before I deal with the details of what she's saying, let me just nit for a sec. See, I must be behind the times. I was under the impression that it was still polite practice, when one artist is asked to compare his/her work to that of another artist in the same field, to say something to the effect of "of course I respect so-and-so's work very much," or "of course, who-and-what did such an interesting thing with blah..." It does not matter if you intend to totally waste the person's work in your next sentence - there is still Protocol to be followed. One may, for instance, take the tack of Sir Ian McKellan when asked about Christopher Lee in one of the LotR commentaries, and say something about all the many many many movies the other artist has made... and then slyly say (I paraphrase!) "of course, even he would agree that they weren't all good."
See, that's how a true master makes a vague slight in the direction of a 'rival.' And of course the big trick is to never once indicate that you are dealing with a situation of actual rivalry or even potential to be compared at all... But I digress.
First, I have no idea why she would say that she pre-dates Buffy except in some odd attempt to jump up and down and attempt to claim that SHE DID IT FIRST DAMN IT. To which I say, please. Tons of people have written this kind of story. Nobody particularly cares who did it first.
On the subject of age, she seems to have missed the whole point of Buffy... which was that she was a teenager. As far as I can tell, it's less impressive to see a twenty-something PI saving the world from vampires (something I'm not actually convinced Anita does - I can't remember her actually killing more than two or so vampires in the books that I read... and none of them seemed all that terribly dangerous, particularly not to anybody outside whatever small town they were in at the time. But I might not be remembering correctly, as it's been a while) than to see a teenager trying to live a normal, everyday life and save the world from vampires and other creepy-crawly-demony-thingies. Honestly, if Buffy had been a vampire slayer by intentional vocation, I don't think I'd have been interested. The whole point for me was watching a normal teenager try to cope with the immense responsibility that had been plopped down in her lap.
"...At the beginning of the series, vampires are monsters to Anita. She has no problem killing them. As the series progresses, she begins to question whether she's killing another person who just happens to be a vampire."
She seems to be trying to say that this wasn't an issue that Buffy had... which is just plain wrong-headed, as near as I can tell. Like Anita, Buffy falls in love with a vampire. (At least I'm assuming that Anita was in love with Jean-Claude. I don't actually remember much emotion other than lust...) She comes to respect Spike, another vampire, and is friends with Anya, who used to be a demon. Multiple times over the course of the series a point is made that Buffy doesn't always know who the enemies are - that things aren't as clear-cut as they're "supposed" to be or as she'd like them to be. Demons, werewolves, vampires... all frequently come out seeming very 'human.'
"Another big difference for Anita and her world is that sex is not a bad thing. You don't get punished instantly. If Buffy's universe, if you have sex, really horrible things happen to you. It's like that old horror cliche that only the virgin will survive."
I do tend occasionally to agree with this gripe about Joss-verse, however, I also recognize that Joss was attempting to parallel horror cliches (sex gets girl in trouble) with teenage fears (a guy who seems fantastic suddenly "changes" after the girl has sex with him). Also, Buffy was intended as a play on horror themes and cliches. That was kind of the whole point of the show. And not every instance of sex leads to something bad, even indirectly. ...Just sex with Angel. :P
"in many ways, Anita's world is bigger than Buffy's. There's a wider variety of monsters on a regular basis. I know there are other monsters like werewolves, but they never played that big of a part. I know there were occasionally other monsters aside from vampires, but primarily it was a vampire series. Anita's world covers every kind of shape-shifter I could find in folklore."
And that wouldn't at all be because it's called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," now, would it?
Cheap shot, I know. But seriously.
And in any case, I think that if I went through all the episodes of Buffy, it would probably turn out that other monsters figured just as frequently, if not more often, as vampires. We've got bug-teachers, demons of all sorts of kinds, egg-laying-things, trolls, the Gentlemen, ghosts, robots, Adam-the-weird-Terminator-thing, zombies, Frankenstein-style monsters... everything. Her claim of dealing with "every kind of shape-shifter I could find in folklore" comes down, for me at least, to "I have Anita *screw* every animal I could possibly turn into a sexy furry." I admit that my memory of the later books in particular is a bit dim, but I remember nothing at all impressive or unique about her folkloric research or usage.
All in all... if she was trying to make Anita (and, by extension, herself - nobody could miss how much Anita is an idealized insert of Hamilton, I think) look awesome, as far as I'm concerned she ends up just looking immature, petty, and ill-informed.
...Also, she just pitted herself against one of the biggest and most infamously vocal sections of fandom. I'll be interested to see how long it takes for that to bite her in the butt. :>
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no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:14 pm (UTC)Also, I just checked and if Wiki is to be believed, Buffy the movie came out a year before the first Anita Blake book...
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:22 pm (UTC)Pretty much my opinion of the whole thing, as well. I can't imagine that there are many Anita Blake fans who aren't also Joss fans... and in my experience it seems that Joss attracts and impressive degree of devotion in his fans....
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:18 pm (UTC)Seriously? Well heck then. Maybe this non person doesn't need to spend her money on the books then.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:34 pm (UTC)Maybe buy that new buffy DVD set or something.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 10:58 pm (UTC)After reaading that, I absolutely despise her.
In one of her books, Anita says "Size five isn't a woman. Size five is a boy with breasts."
I guess I'm a boy then. And for so long I thought I was, in fact a girl. You can't compare Buffy to Anita. Seriously. There's just so many differences you already wrote down. And The gall of her trying to be all "oh, my books are superior to buffy!" blah blah blah pisses me off. My mom let me watch buffy. My mom would not have let me read the later Anita Blake books in high school (the incessant sex for no other reason).
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 11:11 pm (UTC)As for every kind of monster in folklore . . . most of them are poorly researched and totally dependent on not-quite-accurate American interpretations of the original myths and legends. It's like she's working from a folklore-for-five-year-olds book. Give me someone who doesn't throw in everything she can put a name to, but DOES put thought into what they're using and how they're using it. Like, oh, say, Buffy. Or my current favourite, Kelley Armstrong, who does what LKH tried to do back in the early days- interesting non-humans with different cultures and norms interacting with modern-day America.
no subject
Date: 2007-07-13 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-14 01:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-14 05:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-16 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-07-14 06:27 am (UTC)Anyhoo, but I do really like your comments. They are very well thought out and very interesting. Thanks so much for sharing! *grin*
no subject
Date: 2007-07-15 12:50 am (UTC)