LOLS. With so many culprits to choose from, it's funny to hear that he was the last straw. Had you been reading the Dresden Files or his other series? (Not that it matters, I expect he's pretty fail in both.)
I picked up the Dresden Files once, ages ago, and was like, "Man, this is not very good!" and only got into it again through fandom. Found some fics, liked 'em a bunch, thought, "Okay fine I'll read more canon so I understand them better" and.... ended up writing an epic of my own. >_<
The thing is though, I never write fic of stuff that I'm actually a fan of -- I write fic when a story has a kernel of potential but piss-poor execution. And when I got to talking with other readers of Dresden Files slashfic (won't go so far as to call them "fans" either), it turned out I wasn't alone. A lot of people said that they'd been seriously turned off by the sexism in that series, that they'd read the first couple books so they could follow the fics, and then never touched canon again.
And being a feminist and a comic book fan is such a very hard tightrope to walk...
Ugh, I can imagine. I'm sure you've seen the fridged-female list that Gail Simone put together -- it's like watching a genocide on the news, the atrocities just go on, and on, and on. I believe someone put together a similar list of what happens to gay male characters in comic books, and it was largely the same, except that one hits closer to home for me. Treatment of gays in fantasy has been driving me up a fucking wall lately -- if I read about ONE MORE sadistic gay villain, I will not be responsible for my actions.
And it's funny how that failtastic stereotyping of gays so often comes hand-in-hand with equally awful stereotyping of women. Brings me to a theory I'm still chewing on: that when we say an author isn't good at writing women, I'm coming to suspect that they're not good at writing men either -- they just have a wider palette of archetypes to choose from.
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I picked up the Dresden Files once, ages ago, and was like, "Man, this is not very good!" and only got into it again through fandom. Found some fics, liked 'em a bunch, thought, "Okay fine I'll read more canon so I understand them better" and.... ended up writing an epic of my own. >_<
The thing is though, I never write fic of stuff that I'm actually a fan of -- I write fic when a story has a kernel of potential but piss-poor execution. And when I got to talking with other readers of Dresden Files slashfic (won't go so far as to call them "fans" either), it turned out I wasn't alone. A lot of people said that they'd been seriously turned off by the sexism in that series, that they'd read the first couple books so they could follow the fics, and then never touched canon again.
And being a feminist and a comic book fan is such a very hard tightrope to walk...
Ugh, I can imagine. I'm sure you've seen the fridged-female list that Gail Simone put together -- it's like watching a genocide on the news, the atrocities just go on, and on, and on. I believe someone put together a similar list of what happens to gay male characters in comic books, and it was largely the same, except that one hits closer to home for me. Treatment of gays in fantasy has been driving me up a fucking wall lately -- if I read about ONE MORE sadistic gay villain, I will not be responsible for my actions.
And it's funny how that failtastic stereotyping of gays so often comes hand-in-hand with equally awful stereotyping of women. Brings me to a theory I'm still chewing on: that when we say an author isn't good at writing women, I'm coming to suspect that they're not good at writing men either -- they just have a wider palette of archetypes to choose from.