I don't want to read about your fetish

Weekend for me! Woo.

Watched Godzilla on Netflix, this version appears to be done anime style in a series of movies, it is incredibly grim but I had a good time.

I have been reading more lately, I kind of stopped reading books for like a month or two and that was depressing, right now I am working through the Wheel of Time novels again, it has literally been almost twenty years since I have read some of them so it's basically like reading them for the first time.

It's honestly help up pretty well so far, I am up to book seven I think. There is a level of tedium that sets in to epic fantasy where you can tell the author is spinning his wheels while waiting to resolve the plot, and that has started happening, but for the most part the characters are compelling, with a range of pro and antagonists with varied motivations, very few people are strictly good, and very few irredeemably evil, although those exist too of course. Robert Jordan was honestly a pretty good writer and it is a shame he died so early.

That said, boy howdy did he have issues with women. Okay that might not be true, perhaps it is more accurate to say that he has no idea what women are like. Every single female character, and there are many, have exactly, and I do mean exactly, the same views with respect to gender, namely that men are stupid and need to be "guided" to the correct decisions. One can make the argument that men are pretty terrible in real life I know, but terrible isn't what they are going for in the books, just that men don't know what is best for them.

In the novels, the women are wrong more often than they are right, at least with respect to dealing with the guys, they are portrayed as know it all nags and most of them secretly lust for the main character, who is busy attempting to save the world and confused by the ladies around him.

Like, if you take it as just how the world is in the setting then it kind of works, but mostly it's jarring and weird. I will give him credit though, he never uses rape as a motivation for any of his characters

It will surprise no one that I like vast amounts of fantasy and science fiction, but the genre does have a problem when it comes to sex. Now obviously fans are terrible, I will write about how awful nerds are another time, but the authors tend to expose their fucking bizarre hang-ups when they are allowed to get creative.

Sex is cool, I am not saying there shouldn't be sex, or even rape, in novels, but if you are writing Tolkien clone number 549882, then write that Tolkien clone, it doesn't need rape camps to make it edgier, you can give your female character motivation that doesn't revolve around finding the right person to bang and your specific justifications for incest are completely unneeded at any time. Looking at you late career Robert Heinlein, and any time in his life Piers Anthony, also Terry Goodkind, John Ringo, George RR Martin, etc, etc.

Which brings me to Warhammer 40K, because of course it does. In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war, the overarching conflict is between humanity an the gods of chaos, representing war, change, disease, and excess, it is the latter that makes the setting unique, the god represent hedonism and excess in all its forms, sexual included, however there are a couple hundred novels set in the universe and in none of them that I have read, and I have read a great many, is there explicit rape, hell even implied rape is rare. Like we can all assume that stuff happens, but the authors seem to follow the policy of trusting that the reader can draw that conclusion without it being spelled out for them. To be fair many of the books revolve around Space Marines, which are great big sausage fests and the interaction between characters mainly consists of descriptions of limbs flying everywhere, but there are others that focus on the humans, and even on the stuff that isn't huge battles, they are about investigating mysteries, rooting out cultists, or tracking down criminals, and the characters manage to have relationships and motivations that have nothing to do with sex or gender.

It's really quite remarkable, and I assume intentionally done by editorial decree. Which suggests to me that perhaps more publishers might want to adopt similar rules. I feel like it could be done, basically you need to ask yourself "does my story end differently if I take out my rape or creepy sex stuff?" If the answer is no, then take that shit out, if the answer is yes, then you probably still can take it out honestly, or at least change it, but there's a start anyway.

I realize based on the sales figures the authors I mentioned above put out that I am unlikely to see the change I want soon, Game of Thrones is hella popular and the other authors have literally sold millions of books as well. But I gotta wonder how much the genre is being held back by writers who can't keep their dick out of their books. How many women picked up a Piers Anthony novel, read a justification for preteen sexual intercourse with a thirty year old, and then out it right back down and never looked at the genre again, for that matter how many men did the same thing? I mean we always hear about people not reading much anymore, could it be that our pop writing is fucking creeping people out?

Just a thought