I Am Completely Serious

Because I was throwing a hissy fit about Anita Blake on Tumblr, I am reposting this comment I made about about that series a while back:

Well, the thing is that AB was the first urban fantasy/paranormal romance series of a particular modern breed: the competent female protagonist with a cynical worldview doing a dangerous job and protecting the weak. She's unappreciated for it - and realistically broke, which I think is an important element here - until some equally-competent supernatural guys in positions of power show up, admire her, vy for her affections, offer her wealth and security, etc.

The latter part is obviously not a new thing for romance, but the first part was. Urban fantasy heroines pre-Blake were like typical romance heroines in that they tended to be kind of passive figures, unable to defend themselves, much less anyone else. They might have some sort of special heritage or magical powers, but it was something that for whatever reason, they didn't actively use until forced.

And then here was this whole series about this sarcastic woman going out and fighting zombies every day. What makes these books important and attractive is that Blake, though she frequently seems outclassed early on, always ends up able to take care of herself and those around her. The first book was about her rescuing Jean-Claude, the vampire who's in love with her, from a female vampire.

...But then it all turned into weird softcore BDSM erotica! And now a lot of people know more about Laurell K. Hamilton's private kinks than we originally anticipated. Books 7 and 8 (Burnt Offerings and Blue Moon) were where the problem started to get obvious, as I recall, though I think it wasn't until the latter that scenes explaining werecreature pack mating/power dynamics and analyzing people's relative sexiness actually started outnumbering plot-related scenes.

Then there was book 9, Obsidian Butterfly, which was sort of a self-conscious backtrack to the early-series formula, and obliquely and maybe-accidentally self-analytical, with several scenes directly mirroring those from the first book. But having gotten that out of her system, she threw all shame out the window and wrote the demented Narcissus in Chains, and from then on it was apparently all werecreature orgies and metaphysically-induced orgasms. (I couldn't even finish NiC, so for this I rely on the reports of others.)

The early books haven't aged well, now that there are so many others following the same basic plotline and doing it better: they're simultaneously formulaic and badly-paced, and the prose lies someplace in between utilitarian and awkward. They're also very violent - I would say unusually so - but lacking the sense of humanity required to make it feel necessary and earned. And there's a lot of really unpleasant misogyny aimed at women who aren't Blake. With maybe one exception, they're always either victims she needs to protect or monsters she needs to destroy.

Basically, I would recommend Marjorie Liu, JD Robb, or Ilona Andrews instead.

(Persons who have been reading the askblog for my Homestuck fanfic wherein Kanaya has a blog may recognize some of these words. My characterization of the alien vampire is flawless and entirely uninformed by my own prejudices.)

Tiger Eye, Shadow Touch, The Red Heart of Jade, and Eye of Heaven, by Marjorie Liu

These are the first four books in Liu's Dirk and Steele paranormal romance series. Dirk and Steele is a "detective agency" that's basically the paranormal romance X-Men - people with various magical and psychic powers running around saving the world every couple months. Characters make fun of the name in every book, and are pretty uniformly familiar with the genre they're in. They remain, however, very much bound by said genre's conventions. So, if you don't like paranormal romances, you won't like these; if you do, you probably will. They're pretty good at being what they are.

Each of the books involves a Dirk and Steele associate encountering someone with some sort of magical powers and helping them out of a bad situation, while defeating some towering villain or conspiracy. To summarize:

Tiger Eye - Dela, who can do weird things with metal, comes into possession of a magic box which allows her to control Hari, an immortal shapeshifter guy who is not very happy about the box. There is also an evil wizard. They fall in love (Dela and Hari; the evil wizard's involved only peripherally), taking a short break to introduce the male protagonists of the next three books. This is set mostly in Hong Kong, which, like World of Warcraft, is just chock-full of dragons pretending to be human and making unreasonable demands of passers-by.

Shadow Touch - Artur, a psychometrist who used to be a member of the Russian mafia, is kidnapped by the Syndicate, Dirk and Steele's inevitable evil rival organization. There, he meets Elena, who has been kidnapped for her healing powers, as well as various other people whose romantic fates will presumably be dealt with in later books.

Set in Russia, which, as we all know, is populated almost entirely by mafiosi, secret agents, and ballerinas.

The Red Heart of Jade - Dean, who can sense the location of anything or anyone that he's encountered once, is in Taiwan trying to catch a serial killer, and runs into Mirabelle, his childhood first love. Both have thought the other was dead since they were teenagers, for reasons that don't hold up to much scrutiny, but whatever. Mirabelle's an archaeologist now, and obviously has just found the magical artifact that the serial killer has been searching for all this time. And then there's reincarnation and flashbacks and mutilation and all of a sudden Dean can teleport and whoa. The ending is kind of just a bunch of things smashing together; I think I understood what happened, but that's mainly because I read a lot of manga.

Mainland China and Taiwan, too, turn out to be located somewhere within World of Warcraft, but we have yet to establish the precise whereabouts of the rest of East Asia. It'll probably be cleared up in a later book.

Eye of Heaven - Blue, who can control electricity, has an evil billionaire father who has just faked his own death, and is blackmailing Blue into finding the telekinetic half-brother he never knew he had, who has run away to join the circus. Both brothers fall in love with the lion tamer, Iris, who happens to be a were-leopard. Things continue to get sillier. Subplot themes include organ transplants, long-lost mothers, three or four separate evil organizations which are trying to kidnap one or all of these characters, someone losing an eye, and I think the cast of Yami no Matsuei ran through the background real fast at one point.

leprechauns

yetis (the Jonathan Coulton song doesn't count)

krakens

fauns

orcs (I'm working on this one.)

abumi-guchi, or any other tsukumogami

hungry ghosts

a guy who stepped on a crack and broke his mother's back

Jews. The kind who drink the blood of Christian children to cure themselves of those tails they were born with, I mean.

Catholic Saints

lawn gnomes

Santa Claus

The Amazon synopsis of Archangel's Kiss, the second book in Nalini Singh's skeevy "Angels make vampires" series:

( Cut for spoilers for the first book. )

How many horrifying things can you find in that synopsis? How many horrifying things in each sentence? It's like a quickly-scribbled draft for the Problematic Paranormal Romance Drinking Game.

It's hilarious that Raphael is "stunningly dangerous," rather than "terrifyingly dangerous" or "stunningly gorgeous," as the layperson might expect. In paranormal romances, it is a matter of course that these concepts be conflated! My fondness for the genre shames me.

I actually find myself very reluctant to read paranormals recently, because I find that some writers internalize this a little too much. The point at which it becomes particularly troubling is when an author wants her hero to be a Sexy Monster, but puts all her energy into the Monster part and then expects the reader, using her knowledge of the genre, to extrapolate the sexy.

From what's in the text of the first book, Raphael's just a sociopath who happens to have pretty wings. There's not really much in there to redeem all the horrible stuff he does. He was going to kill a baby because the girl wouldn't do what he wanted, and it is my position that pretty wings do not make up for this.

But because he's a paranormal romance hero, people read him through the lens of other, superficially similar characters, and so absolve him of his villainy, assuming that, per genre requirements, he shall absolve himself by the end of the book. That he failed to do so is, pitted against the overwhelming weight of genre formula, a mere technicality.

(Anyway, I've decided that in my awesome paranormal romance, there's going to be an ancient evil that has a seal on it and they stupidly unseal it and the ancient evil will be the heroine. It is subversive because ordinarily we expect the ancient evil to be the hero, right?

Paranormal romances are so bad.)

Spoilers for Psy/Changeling series up to book 3 (Caressed by Ice).

( Read the rest of this entry » )

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)