The equivalent in another genre would be to write a country house mystery in which there are many suspects, because everyone staying at the place had some connection to and a reason to want to kill the multiple-stab-wound murder victim! And then the detective works it out: they all are guilty! They took turns, each of them, stabbing the victim! So the wounds are all strangely angled and stuff! Can you imagine the reaction that mystery would get?
But fantasy (genre) works still get less respect, so we get lead-fingered writers coming in and being magisterially insightful and helpful and explaining fantasy for the poor genre-bound savages. I'd prefer these people to keep writing mediocre literary novels without bothering with the fantasy stuff.
I have not read everything, but I have not yet seen a fantasy work that succeeds in reconciling feminism, or at least the idea that women are people who aren't men, with traditional mythologies and folklore. I would like to read a well-written, literary, intelligent fantasy novel in which those two social movements explicitly wrangle for fantasy's soul, because the reliance on those old folktales contributes to a corrosive conservatism in genre fantasy. (Possibly that's what Grossman is telling us, unwittingly I think.)
It is especially disappointing that Grossman fell down on this so badly, because Narnia specifically is the focus of much conversation revolving around "the problem of Susan" and it would be a great place to stage such a revisitation. Better than the more overtly problematic Middle-Earth, I think, because more superficially innocent and child-friendly.
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Date: 2014-09-12 07:22 pm (UTC)But fantasy (genre) works still get less respect, so we get lead-fingered writers coming in and being magisterially insightful and helpful and explaining fantasy for the poor genre-bound savages. I'd prefer these people to keep writing mediocre literary novels without bothering with the fantasy stuff.
I have not read everything, but I have not yet seen a fantasy work that succeeds in reconciling feminism, or at least the idea that women are people who aren't men, with traditional mythologies and folklore. I would like to read a well-written, literary, intelligent fantasy novel in which those two social movements explicitly wrangle for fantasy's soul, because the reliance on those old folktales contributes to a corrosive conservatism in genre fantasy. (Possibly that's what Grossman is telling us, unwittingly I think.)
It is especially disappointing that Grossman fell down on this so badly, because Narnia specifically is the focus of much conversation revolving around "the problem of Susan" and it would be a great place to stage such a revisitation. Better than the more overtly problematic Middle-Earth, I think, because more superficially innocent and child-friendly.