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Hrm.
I know Sady writes with a confrontational tone (that’s half the appeal, I think). But I don’t see how Alyssa’s post engages Sady’s.
Sady’s post is, “I can’t enjoy GRRM because he writes about white people in traditionally creepy abusive roles.” Alyssa’s post is, “GRRM could have written it nobler – less Eurocentric, less centered on men – but his choice not to doesn’t make him bad.” And they’re both right and it’s great!
I thought the Sady Doyle thing was funny as hell. I kind of agree with Coldheart, though: despite Rosenberg criticizing Doyle’s piece, I’m not sure it engages specifically and it seems to miss some stuff Doyle said, particularly about engaging fans (who are not Doyle’s audience).
For what it’s worth, I haven’t read ASOIAF and have no intention of reading it. It’s not the rapes, although the Doyle piece tells me the sexual violence would probably squick me. The concept that violence and general high-mud storytelling makes it medieval really hacks me off, though, even before we get to questions of sexism and rape.
Sady confrontational? Never! Also remarkably impenetrable when it comes to criticism of her positions, even from within the feminist community. Should be interesting to see how this shakes out.
That said, and whether this is true of GRRM or not (I think it is), nerd culture very definitely skews white het cis and male, which is a perspective I have almost no sympathy for. And it’s something that’s only going to be successfully addressed from inside the community.
I quite enjoyed the first couple books of ASOIF, though I couldn’t force myself through the um… fourth?… one.
But even while enjoying them I had to admit there was more than a bit of racism, sexism, ablrism, and psuedo-liberal-not-really-equal-but-pretends-it-is inclusion*.
So, yea… the books are a mess, and so they’re going to have points where most criticisms are true and points where they aren’t. It isn’t like we’re talking about “literature” where the book is so tightly constructed that you can expect every part to hold together as a philosophical whole. We’re talking about messy pulp where the evils of society, as well as the current political arguments about them (for and against) march forth in their over-simplified, stupid, wretched, brawling glory. There are times where the books are right up racist about say, Central Asian culture, and other times where they are right up apologist about the ills of male dominated, honor based society.
If anything I think the idea that I find most difficult/damaging here is the idea that GRRM has the control over his material to be deliberately doing any of these things in a sustained manner. Better, IMNHO, to look at them not for his authorial intent, but as a manifestation of a culture at war with itself.
And no, I don’t mean that of the people in the book.
*My current poster child for this is Lost, which looks inclusive but isn’t.
Oh god, Lost was terrible, no?
In case you’re interested, Alyssa Rosenberg put up a sort of follow-up questionnaire about gender and fiction, and it would be great if you participated.
The questions and my thoughts are here:
http://theoncominghope.blogspot.com/2011/08/on-gender-and-fiction.html
That Rosenberg questionnaire is pretty is pretty bizarre as a response to Doyle’s rant/nerdbait. When did it stop being OK to say “these books are full of nasty stuff and that’s creepy so I don’t want to read them?”
The whole nostalgia question is pretty wrongheaded too. Nostalgia for what? To draw a charged example from modern American culture (thank you, Ta-Nehisi Coates), it’s easy to be nostalgic for the antebellum era if you’re white and think you’d be rich and don’t bother to think much about the human cost of the slave society supporting you. If you’re black, if your ancestors were slaves, you’re not going to be nostalgic for that, obviously, because you’re not going to ignore that cost. The past means different things for different people and nostalgic impulses vary accordingly.
“[They're] full of nasty stuff” is agreed upon by all, I imagine, and “I don’t want to read them” isn’t a matter for dispute. I think it’s the “that’s creepy” part that’s at issue.
I don’t find the questionnaire to be particularly off-topic, either. (Tendentious, maybe.) I found it surprising to see SoI&F lumped in with nostalgia-inflected fantasy; if anything, the books seemed to me to be in the grips of the view that the Middle Ages were a period of unmitigated crapsackery. GRRM’s relentless homo homini lupus pessimism doesn’t excuse him from the sexual-creepiness charge (not by a long shot IMV), but the nostalgia thing just doesn’t stick.
Tendentious is probably a better word for that Rosenberg quiz. As for creepy, I don’t see how creepy is anything but a subjective term; it’s not as though there’s some numerical threshold of rapes in the books below which a fan can turn to Doyle and say “hah, officially not creepy!”
One fan defense of the books seems to be that ASOIAF is a Watchman-like commentary on doorstop Eurocentric fantasy (apparently complete with erratic and delayed publication schedule). I find this far more likely than the idea that GRRM is nostalgic for ye olden days. On the other hand, the idea that he’s using the Wars of the Roses to make a polemic about doorstop fantasy and then passing it off as “historically accurate” because it’s gritty and grimdark and full of what fans have described to me as “sick, sadistic, fuck(s)” is almost designed to punch my “should not read this” buttons.
@Ginger: My read is that Sady wanted “creepy” to carry some non-trivial moral weight; that doesn’t mean it’s non-subjective, but it does demand response, whether with apology or assent, in a way that ‘mere’ aesthetic response doesn’t.
I don’t give much credit to the grimdark defense — not because I don’t think there’s something to be said for exploring the consequences of the collapse of a functioning polity, even doing so in some explicit detail, but rather because my sense is that GRRM goes to the well of sexual violence a bit too frequently, and his willingness to enlist major female characters in scenes of ‘fan service’ didn’t win him any benefit-of-the-doubt in my book.
(It also doesn’t help that the books become increasingly indistinguishable from the doorstop fantasies SoI&F ostensibly critiques.)
@katechon Doyle is nerdbaiting, absolutely. It was funny as hell but also violated the Wil Wheaton “don’t be a dick” rule hard. “Creepy” is intended to push buttons, as is the bit about throwing your toys into the fire, nyah nyah. The judgement inherent in the word is like a nerd honeypot. I’ve seen people go through the books and do a count and come up with different numbers and conclude that only 40% of the women are raped and molested, not 80%, so there! like that’s going to make anyone who gets a creepy vibe from the books feel less creeped out.
The grimdark defenses make no sense to me because I have an MA in history, my field was a slightly earlier period of medieval England, and my thesis dealt with property transactions (settlements on women in marriage). I came thisclose to doing the PhD and going on to teach. The Wars of the Roses was for a long time an amateur area of interest of mine (our house domain is whiterose.org because we’re Yorkists) so I never did that period as a pro thing because of the bias. But I can recognize a lot of characters based on the fan critiques; the books sound to me like The Tudors with more magic, limb-lopping, and dirt and less (nominally) consensual sex. I liked The Tudors, but I don’t think it tells me anything “authentic” about the history, so I don’t know why I should expect ASOIAF to.
I’ve got to say, that Doyle did a pretty good job of convincing me that neither she nor GRRM are worth reading.