Garage Sale tomorrow

[pegkerr]

Am exhausted and covered with dust; have been hauling stuff up from the basement for our two-day garage sale which starts tomorrow. This has been a traumatic experience as Rob and I have vastly different opinions about what we should keep versus what we should pitch or sell. If I wasn't married to this man, I'd probably own about a third to a quarter of what I own now.

Started reading another novel today, a first novel. Unfortunately, it starts with a trope that I've really come to hate. So many fantasy novels starring a female protagonist open with 1) a group of thugs rapes the heroine and/or destroys her home and kills her family, and she spends the rest of the novel acquiring magic so she can get revenge or 2) a group of thugs almost rapes the heroine and/or destroys her home and kills her family, but she fights them off with her superior magical powers.

In this one, she fought 'em off. Well, the hero helped. I rolled my eyes when I got to the part about his silver wolf-like stare.

I want to read more novels that get the female protagonist moving without a sexual threat. Please: think of other reasons for women to go out and have adventures.



heidi8 pointed me to this article about the world of fan fiction. Quite interesting.

Peg

Comments

[aome.livejournal.com]

Huh. Never thought about it before. Mirror of her Dreams/A Man Rides Through (Stephen Donaldson) doesn't start with that premise. By the Sword (Lackey) does start with Kerowyn's home and family being attacked, and she does exact revenge, but that's all in the first couple of chapters, and then she moves on to her own goals, her own story, so I'm not sure how you'd qualify that. Tiger Burning Bright (Lackey/Norton/Bradley) involves losing her home, and all the royal women going into hiding to reclaim their land from underneath, but there's no "gaining magic" or "having superior magical powers" aspect.

Hmmmm.... Interesting thing to think about. And good luck with the garage sale -- I'd have a lot less stuff if it weren't for my husband, too.

[lcohen]

> Mirror of her Dreams/A Man Rides Through (Stephen Donaldson) doesn't start with that premise.

they didn't start with that premise, no, but my (possibly too dim?) recollection is that both books were rife with scenes of the heroine being under sexual threat or close to being seduced because of magical influence--to the point where, if the books hadn't been heavy enough that something might have broken, i might have hurled them across the room.

[cliosfolly.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of Lackey's novels use "abused heroine" (if not "raped heroine") trope as a method for disconnecting a girl from her family and position her to go out and have Adventures. Arrows of the Queen, By the Sword as you noted, Magic's Pawn, and several others of hers all use this method (though the last has a male main char, not a female--in fact, Lackey uses abuse/misunderstandings as a tool to separate chars from unwanted initial settings fairly frequently, gender-equally). McCaffrey does it, too, with Lessa and Menolly.

Jo Walton's The King's Peace starts out with a rape, as well, but one that is very well handled; it has after-effects and consequences not only later in that book itself, but in its sequel: political and social consequences (as opposed to what I'd consder the primarily personal and emotional consequences of the rape in Deerskin).