Jul. 27th, 2013

dotsandlines: The constellation Orion (Default)
Close enough to the end of the month. (Ulterior motive: Wrote a bit last night, so if this keeps up, it will boost next month's count. Heh.)

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I'm reading an ebook right now - not gonna name it, don't want to be a jerk - and I don't like it too much. I feel like the author is one of those "Women are unknowable alien creatures" types, and yet one of his narrators is a woman. So he has no idea what to do with her. Her scenes are flat and weird, and suffer greatly from omniscient breasts syndrome - even though the narrator is just doing stuff and not admiring herself rapturously in a mirror, the narration goes to ridiculous lengths panting over her assets. From her POV. When she, the character, is not paying attention to her looks at all. It's fourth-wall-breaking and bizarre.

Anyway, this ebook is bugging the hell out of me, but I am giving it a chance to see how it plays out. Also, to identify what exactly annoys me about it, and learn from that.

a) Omniscient breasts syndrome
b) Uses "unphased" instead of "unfazed", so editor is incompetent


That linked essay, BTW, also brings up an intriguing anecdote about a reader being offended because the author was "trying to make him gay" - she wrote from a straight female character's POV, including the character being attracted to men. The reader was offended/uncomfortable because he had never encountered the concept of a narrator who was not exactly like him, a straight (probably white) man. So he had no concept of reading except as a self-insert, and didn't know how to see a story from a fundamentally different person's POV. Fascinating. I tend to take that sort of thing for granted.

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