Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2020-12-11 12:00 am
silveradept) wrote2020-12-11 12:00 am
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December Days 2020 #10: The Incarnation Of The Suck Fairy
[O hai. It's December Days time, and this year, I'm taking requests, since it's been a while and I have new people on the list and it's 2020, the year where everyone is both closer to and more distant from their friends and family. So if you have a thought you'd like me to talk about on one of these days, let me know and I'll work it into the schedule. That includes things like further asks about anything in a previous December Days tag, if you have any questions on that regard.]
Another question that I picked up from a different question meme going around:
Well, given how many words I've written as I continue to work my way through it, and the fact that I officially call it part of a series that is "The Suck Fairy's Greatest Hits", the obvious suggestion is that I was one of the many people who absolutely adored The Dragonriders of Pern and have fallen out of love with it the more that I read of it, from the authors that are involved. That's not quite the case, as I wasn't particularly in love with it right from the beginning. As evidenced by not having already read the whole set, both authors and all, but also because all that I really remember about it is the setting and the idea of the dragons as being different than the standard-issue villainous greedy creatures that I had encountered in other works. (And that didn't stop me from carving my way through so many of those unhappy dragons in things like Final Fantasy games, so, whatever.) And the rest of the world outside of the dragons probably seemed vaguely feudalish at the time, so I don't think I paid it much mind, especially not compared to the possibilities of that kind of dragon. I was young then, and I suspect a whole lot of things passed me by that I didn't understand, especially not the way that the mating flight rays actually worked and the consequences of them. So, no, that's not one of my past loves, not in the "absolutely love this" way, and even now, with all the time and words spent on showing up just how terrible Pern-as-written is, I can still see how the concept itself could have been used for something better, where things could have taken an off-ramp to being something only mildly terrible, or even something where the unique issues that come with having telepathically bonded dragons were a known quantity and have workarounds built into the society to make them less terrible, or to use them in ways that minimize the amount of harm that happens when every so often, people are seized by uncontrollable sexual desire as the dragons go flying overhead. The sorts of things that a good and robust fic culture can produce. Or that someone else can do in a pastiche-y sort of way, where it's clear what someone's looking at without actually naming the place, and showing the different way that it can be taken care of.
No, the thing that actually qualifies as "the thing that I unironically enjoyed when I was younger, but would definitely go back to with the understanding that it was absolutely chock-full of Suck that I didn't notice because I was younger" is just about anything written by Piers Anthony, including the Mode series, the Incarnations of Immortality, and the Phaze books. It seems to be a truism of the Internet that your first username comes about from something that you enjoyed when you finally came of age to be on the Internet, nominally thirteen, but almost always younger than that these days. I don't hide that I took my name from the Phaze series, choosing a color that hadn't been described in the canon, with a unique and, what I thought at the time was a balanced power set, and used it from there. At least, for those things that I got to before someone else did on the Internet. So, yeah, I was in fanfic mode, but as a fan of the thing rather than with wisdom and experience that would make it much clearer to me that these book were not the kind of thing to get into. They definitely had appeal, in the shameless way that puns were made, and the way that the Phaze setting basically ran on science fiction and fantasy tropes and didn't hide that they were deliberately intended to do so. It probably helped that I started on book two of what would eventually be seven books, but fannish-me stops the series at six, considering seven to have been something unconnected to the main story, and not done particularly well compared to the others. Eventually, I went back and read book one, and I remember thinking at the time that I hadn't missed much in the way of plot, characterization, or anything else. What was present, though, was the scene where Stile, the main character of the series, receives a very expensive and very advanced gynoid, Sheena, as a gift from an unknown benefactor. Being at least mildly genre savvy, Stile requests a technical printout from Sheena so that he can analyze it to make sure that Sheena doesn't have any hidden programming or other suspicious attributes that would make her dangerous to Stile, since she seems to be there to help him defeat and avoid the enemies that he isn't aware he has and has made because of his newfound ability to swap himself between the high-fantasy Phaze and the techno-dystopia Proton. (Things I might note more now - Proton is composed of Citizens and serfs. Serfs are not allowed to wear clothing, and can basically be put to whatever use the Citizen that owns them desires of them, with the repercussions of refusing their Citizen being getting fired. Unowned serfs are ejected from the planet, but any serf that manages to stick it out for twenty years and doesn't become a Citizen gets to retire from the business with enough of the Unobtanium Protonite to make them fabulously wealthy anywhere else in the galaxy, so there's always a steady stream of immigrants to Proton willing to trade twenty years for a shot at becoming super-rich.) Sheena is reluctant to give up the printout, but Stile insists, and Sheen complies, but then afterward, she says that Stile has raped her. Stile's response, basically, is "Wow, I've got to keep on my toes, because this gynoid is pretty advanced and has way more of a sense of self than I expected to be making accusations like that." Nothing, really, about the ethics of his decision there, any attempts to find another way that would be acceptable to get the information he is requesting, or any other thing, because she's not human and robots and computers, even those with advanced artificial intelligences, are not the same as humans and can only pretend to things like emotions or understanding the concept of being violated in such a way.
I also stuck my way out through the entire seven-book series of the Incarnations of Immortality, which, y'know, a lot of the books that I realize are full of Suck Fairy are things that have reasonably interesting premises at their cores, but their executions are terrible and full of the worst kinds of things. Like, a series that posits that various abstract concepts like Time, Death, War, Fate, and the like are actually offices held by humans who become immortal for as long as they are part of the office, until they are phased out, forced out, or the precipitating event that puts someone else in the office happens. I have a feeling that if I went back, I'd see a lot more of the various bits of sexual politics, or that some of the puns were less funny and more mean-spirited, and there's also the thing where both Good and Evil are also office-holders, and even though Evil eventually gets a book of his own (and falls in love with someone else), he's still, you know, evil, and has been interfering with everyone else and doing evil things to him. That, and as it turns out, Good has been so obsessed with themselves that they've basically neglected the rest of Creation. And at least one of the characters is a ghost who committed suicide, so I can't imagine that's been treated well.
And then there's the Mode series which doesn't try to hide the way that it has a lot of ideas about nonconsensual sex and that being particularly normalized for the worlds that are visited that have them. And without the punning and fantasy-ish elements that Xanth uses to try and hide some of its more reprehensible decisions. There's one world that does zygomatic separation that supposedly turns what would be one entity into three, one composed solely of masculinity, one of femininity and one without either of such traits. You can imagine what kinds of stereotypes are involved there, and who might be engaged in permanent come-ons to visitors or other characters. There's a different world where psychic horses have enslaved the entire human population, and apparently think nothing of using their psychic control to have some other human woman satisfy the sexual urges of a man when it turns out that by accident, a character who's been made up to resemble such slaves has her headpiece knocked astray, which apparently signals that she's sexually available and interested in any man that comes by and sees her.
One of those things that we have figured out, as time goes by, is that there's a lot of things in the books that we missed when we were younger. Whether because it was something we didn't understand at the time due to youth, or something that we ignored because we didn't want to pay attention to that part in favor of some other part, the reason the Suck Fairy exists as a concept is because those things were still there, and going back to notice them often ruins what were good memories of the thing that went before. These days, with the wonders of telecommunication, the Suck Fairy comes much faster than it might otherwise. Even now, of course, there are still authors and creators that stay as missing stairs, protected from the consequences of their actions by their fame and clout, but there are many more who are being found out and publicized for the terrible people they are, and some of them are particularly open about their terribleness. Piers Anthony, after all, openly disparaged someone who was doing deconstructive work on Xanth, someone I respected as an excellent deconstructor, and that made him even less of a person worthy of respect than he had already fallen to. And J.K. Rowling's open support of trans exclusion has made Hogwarts even less of a good destination than it was once you started looking at how it functioned and what values it espoused. And The Problem of Susan, which suddenly makes Lion Jesus a lot less of a benevolent deity, not that he particularly claimed to be tame in the first place.
But, at least for the question asked, I cut my teeth on some pretty punny materials that had settings that were interesting at the time, and a lot of the things that were happening were things that I read but didn't understand, and so they didn't affect my enjoyment of the work. It takes courage to come back to those things and read them again, but also, there was a comment I heard or read somewhere that authors turning out to be terrible in time doesn't mean that your enjoyment of the work at the time is somehow tainted and wrong because you didn't know, and your happiness and enjoyment of the thing was genuine, and that's okay. But it's different to know now and enjoy it uncritically than it was then, and someone who persists in uncritically enjoying it now might suffer a certain amount of people being upset with them for that persistence and deliberate decision not to engage with all of the aspects of the person and their works.
Another question that I picked up from a different question meme going around:
What's a canon that you truly, truly loved, but fellow out of love with, and why?
Well, given how many words I've written as I continue to work my way through it, and the fact that I officially call it part of a series that is "The Suck Fairy's Greatest Hits", the obvious suggestion is that I was one of the many people who absolutely adored The Dragonriders of Pern and have fallen out of love with it the more that I read of it, from the authors that are involved. That's not quite the case, as I wasn't particularly in love with it right from the beginning. As evidenced by not having already read the whole set, both authors and all, but also because all that I really remember about it is the setting and the idea of the dragons as being different than the standard-issue villainous greedy creatures that I had encountered in other works. (And that didn't stop me from carving my way through so many of those unhappy dragons in things like Final Fantasy games, so, whatever.) And the rest of the world outside of the dragons probably seemed vaguely feudalish at the time, so I don't think I paid it much mind, especially not compared to the possibilities of that kind of dragon. I was young then, and I suspect a whole lot of things passed me by that I didn't understand, especially not the way that the mating flight rays actually worked and the consequences of them. So, no, that's not one of my past loves, not in the "absolutely love this" way, and even now, with all the time and words spent on showing up just how terrible Pern-as-written is, I can still see how the concept itself could have been used for something better, where things could have taken an off-ramp to being something only mildly terrible, or even something where the unique issues that come with having telepathically bonded dragons were a known quantity and have workarounds built into the society to make them less terrible, or to use them in ways that minimize the amount of harm that happens when every so often, people are seized by uncontrollable sexual desire as the dragons go flying overhead. The sorts of things that a good and robust fic culture can produce. Or that someone else can do in a pastiche-y sort of way, where it's clear what someone's looking at without actually naming the place, and showing the different way that it can be taken care of.
No, the thing that actually qualifies as "the thing that I unironically enjoyed when I was younger, but would definitely go back to with the understanding that it was absolutely chock-full of Suck that I didn't notice because I was younger" is just about anything written by Piers Anthony, including the Mode series, the Incarnations of Immortality, and the Phaze books. It seems to be a truism of the Internet that your first username comes about from something that you enjoyed when you finally came of age to be on the Internet, nominally thirteen, but almost always younger than that these days. I don't hide that I took my name from the Phaze series, choosing a color that hadn't been described in the canon, with a unique and, what I thought at the time was a balanced power set, and used it from there. At least, for those things that I got to before someone else did on the Internet. So, yeah, I was in fanfic mode, but as a fan of the thing rather than with wisdom and experience that would make it much clearer to me that these book were not the kind of thing to get into. They definitely had appeal, in the shameless way that puns were made, and the way that the Phaze setting basically ran on science fiction and fantasy tropes and didn't hide that they were deliberately intended to do so. It probably helped that I started on book two of what would eventually be seven books, but fannish-me stops the series at six, considering seven to have been something unconnected to the main story, and not done particularly well compared to the others. Eventually, I went back and read book one, and I remember thinking at the time that I hadn't missed much in the way of plot, characterization, or anything else. What was present, though, was the scene where Stile, the main character of the series, receives a very expensive and very advanced gynoid, Sheena, as a gift from an unknown benefactor. Being at least mildly genre savvy, Stile requests a technical printout from Sheena so that he can analyze it to make sure that Sheena doesn't have any hidden programming or other suspicious attributes that would make her dangerous to Stile, since she seems to be there to help him defeat and avoid the enemies that he isn't aware he has and has made because of his newfound ability to swap himself between the high-fantasy Phaze and the techno-dystopia Proton. (Things I might note more now - Proton is composed of Citizens and serfs. Serfs are not allowed to wear clothing, and can basically be put to whatever use the Citizen that owns them desires of them, with the repercussions of refusing their Citizen being getting fired. Unowned serfs are ejected from the planet, but any serf that manages to stick it out for twenty years and doesn't become a Citizen gets to retire from the business with enough of the Unobtanium Protonite to make them fabulously wealthy anywhere else in the galaxy, so there's always a steady stream of immigrants to Proton willing to trade twenty years for a shot at becoming super-rich.) Sheena is reluctant to give up the printout, but Stile insists, and Sheen complies, but then afterward, she says that Stile has raped her. Stile's response, basically, is "Wow, I've got to keep on my toes, because this gynoid is pretty advanced and has way more of a sense of self than I expected to be making accusations like that." Nothing, really, about the ethics of his decision there, any attempts to find another way that would be acceptable to get the information he is requesting, or any other thing, because she's not human and robots and computers, even those with advanced artificial intelligences, are not the same as humans and can only pretend to things like emotions or understanding the concept of being violated in such a way.
I also stuck my way out through the entire seven-book series of the Incarnations of Immortality, which, y'know, a lot of the books that I realize are full of Suck Fairy are things that have reasonably interesting premises at their cores, but their executions are terrible and full of the worst kinds of things. Like, a series that posits that various abstract concepts like Time, Death, War, Fate, and the like are actually offices held by humans who become immortal for as long as they are part of the office, until they are phased out, forced out, or the precipitating event that puts someone else in the office happens. I have a feeling that if I went back, I'd see a lot more of the various bits of sexual politics, or that some of the puns were less funny and more mean-spirited, and there's also the thing where both Good and Evil are also office-holders, and even though Evil eventually gets a book of his own (and falls in love with someone else), he's still, you know, evil, and has been interfering with everyone else and doing evil things to him. That, and as it turns out, Good has been so obsessed with themselves that they've basically neglected the rest of Creation. And at least one of the characters is a ghost who committed suicide, so I can't imagine that's been treated well.
And then there's the Mode series which doesn't try to hide the way that it has a lot of ideas about nonconsensual sex and that being particularly normalized for the worlds that are visited that have them. And without the punning and fantasy-ish elements that Xanth uses to try and hide some of its more reprehensible decisions. There's one world that does zygomatic separation that supposedly turns what would be one entity into three, one composed solely of masculinity, one of femininity and one without either of such traits. You can imagine what kinds of stereotypes are involved there, and who might be engaged in permanent come-ons to visitors or other characters. There's a different world where psychic horses have enslaved the entire human population, and apparently think nothing of using their psychic control to have some other human woman satisfy the sexual urges of a man when it turns out that by accident, a character who's been made up to resemble such slaves has her headpiece knocked astray, which apparently signals that she's sexually available and interested in any man that comes by and sees her.
One of those things that we have figured out, as time goes by, is that there's a lot of things in the books that we missed when we were younger. Whether because it was something we didn't understand at the time due to youth, or something that we ignored because we didn't want to pay attention to that part in favor of some other part, the reason the Suck Fairy exists as a concept is because those things were still there, and going back to notice them often ruins what were good memories of the thing that went before. These days, with the wonders of telecommunication, the Suck Fairy comes much faster than it might otherwise. Even now, of course, there are still authors and creators that stay as missing stairs, protected from the consequences of their actions by their fame and clout, but there are many more who are being found out and publicized for the terrible people they are, and some of them are particularly open about their terribleness. Piers Anthony, after all, openly disparaged someone who was doing deconstructive work on Xanth, someone I respected as an excellent deconstructor, and that made him even less of a person worthy of respect than he had already fallen to. And J.K. Rowling's open support of trans exclusion has made Hogwarts even less of a good destination than it was once you started looking at how it functioned and what values it espoused. And The Problem of Susan, which suddenly makes Lion Jesus a lot less of a benevolent deity, not that he particularly claimed to be tame in the first place.
But, at least for the question asked, I cut my teeth on some pretty punny materials that had settings that were interesting at the time, and a lot of the things that were happening were things that I read but didn't understand, and so they didn't affect my enjoyment of the work. It takes courage to come back to those things and read them again, but also, there was a comment I heard or read somewhere that authors turning out to be terrible in time doesn't mean that your enjoyment of the work at the time is somehow tainted and wrong because you didn't know, and your happiness and enjoyment of the thing was genuine, and that's okay. But it's different to know now and enjoy it uncritically than it was then, and someone who persists in uncritically enjoying it now might suffer a certain amount of people being upset with them for that persistence and deliberate decision not to engage with all of the aspects of the person and their works.
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I guess I'm willing to say 'fair for its day' or 'has redeeming characteristics' more with dead authors than current ones, because I'm not actually paying them to keep being terrible if I buy their work. Even though there is, unaddressed, the more nebulous and broad question of what to consume/support and what tradeoffs to accept.
I don't let go of books easily, tbh. Even if the authors are terrible people. Some have been outright cut, though, which, for me, means not just 'I object to many things about this work' but 'I cannot enjoy this work anymore, period.' Some are still on my shelves and even reread that I would not recommend at all.
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And I know that there's always going to be "set out to write good rep on this, turned out to trip over themselves on that" in books. Where the line is differs for everyone, but my base position is that things that are problematic can still be enjoyed, but I would like someone to at least be aware of the issues surrounding the thing and to give them weight and consideration as well.
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Which is not to say the Suck Fairy isn't there, I'm just sorta gently puzzling at what parts y'all are pinging on. (I also may have an innate -10 to Perception and no formal training in literary analysis, so)
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There's an entire scenario in the game based on the conflict in Beirut. The main character accidentally joins a group of edgelords who plan to "win" the scenario (getting the most points by killing others) by using some of their friends as suicide bombers, trading the loss of one point by dying for the significant point gains from kills, plus a point bonus for being the best at killing others. The main character is one of the people tapped to do the suicide run, and the plan goes off without a hitch.
There's also a fantasy scenario in there where a hero is trying to free a castle full of enchanted people that gets played twice, once as the hero (where the main character picked a hero type that can't utter a lie, requiring his avatar to strip so that he can truthfully say there's a naked man in a women's space (iirc) to distract guards). I can't remember if this playthrough had any sex in it, but the main character comes back to it later and plays the evil sorceror, who discovers that he's used all his magic enslaving the castle to his control, and so any other spells he might cast will free people in the castle from his control at random. I forget if there's Piers-typical sex attitudes this time around, either, but there's a high probability that, having discovered what he can do as the sorceror, he takes advantage of the controlled state of someone else's avatar somehow.
There's probably other things, too, but that would involve searching, so, y'know, at your own risk and all that.