Post by Allie on Mar 24, 2018 14:48:28 GMT
Recently, I bought two wlw fantasy romances in the same week. Both included attempted rapes of a main character (by men in both cases, for what that's worth.) This upset me a lot and I've been thinking about it ever since.
Before we go too much farther, I'm going to discuss the specifics of both books. If you don't wish to be spoiled on them, know that while both books are ultimately quite good, I do recommend Daughter of Mystery but I do not recommend The Dark Wife. The fact that I bring them up in the context of this discussion, of course, provides a minor spoiler in and of itself.
Spoilers for The Dark Wife (2011) by Sarah Diemer, the first of the two I read. It has excellent reviews basically everywhere and the concept is entirely up my alley.
This is a lesbian retelling of Persephone and Hades, and the characters are adorable, but it got off on the wrong foot immediately when a queer woman was added to the story to be Persephone's first girlfriend, only to be raped and murdered onscreen by Zeus on page eight. For the rest of the book, the primary factor driving the plot was Zeus's domestic abuse of the entire Olympian pantheon, culminating at the climax of the book when
As I said in the discord: That is absolutely a fair, if not the fair, interpretation of Zeus. But it's not what I thought I was signing up for and I was not ready. And regardless of how horrible Zeus is, because yes, he is a awful, was it really necessary to add a queer woman to the beginning of the story and then have her raped and murdered (turned into a bush, specifically) in the first few pages? Because while that's absolutely a thing Zeus would do, it's not something he did in the original story; and while I support adding stuff in your interpretation of a story, that does mean that you are ultimately responsible for the stuff you added.
It might be relevant to mention that while Bury Your Gays has been a trope since forever, the big explosion in online discussions of it happened around 2015-16, about four or five years after this was published.
Ultimately, I picked up the book expecting and looking forward to a fluffy gay romance, and I got hit in the face with a bucket of sexual assault.
Now, spoilers for Daughter of Mystery (2014) by Heather Rose Jones. As I said before, I do still recommend this book, and am in fact reading the sequel right now.
This is a lesbian fantasy regency romance, complete with debutantes, mysterious pasts, fancy balls, and both court and courtroom politics. I loved it. I was so busy loving it, in fact, that I waved away several mentions of the possibility of sexual assault because I didn't think the book would go there. Then it did, on page 133 of 404, driving the transition to the second act. It was brief, relatively tasteful, and in my opinion fairly well-handled, and it dropped me into a black depression for days because all I wanted was to read a fluffy wlw romance without sexual assault in it. I ended up finishing it, and I'm glad I did, but I was still upset.
By the end of the book it was also revealed
Also, I'm reading the sequel The Mystic Marriage right now, and in chapter 1
As I said, I've been thinking about this experience ever since. Sexual assault hasn't historically been a major trigger for me, but it hit me hard as hell both times. I honestly wish it hadn't been present in either book, although in the case of The Dark Wife
At first I thought I hadn't been paying enough attention to what I was buying. That would be in character, as I hate spoilers and I prefer to go into a book knowing as little as possible about it. But after I finished The Dark Wife I went looking for reviews that mentioned it at all, and I came away feeling like I was the only one who cared. I read review after review, by all kinds of people, praising the book for how wonderful it was. Hardly anybody seemed to find the assault elements worth mentioning. Most of the time when it was mentioned, it was either couched in vague terms ("I loved how she didn't shy away from making Zeus as bad as he was in the myths!") or was as part of a review that was essentially a recap of the entire story, which is the worst kind of review for me. I even encountered some that gushed about how she'd taken the rape elements of the original story out. Which, if you're comparing it to the "rape of Persephone" versions of the old myth, is technically accurate.
And yet, every time I've brought it up in discussions online, folks' reactions have been very similar to mine. It's frustrating, partially because it feels like the people reviewing the books find the scenes unremarkable, partially because it leaves me with no way forward if I want to know ahead of time if a book contains those sorts of scenes.
After I'd finished digging through reviews to no avail, I decided to sit back and really try to figure out why I was as upset as I was. As a writer myself, and as a member of a writing community, it seems worthwhile to at least try to figure out what's going on, because nobody wants a reader to have this kind of reaction to their story.
The honest truth is, I'm not sure. I might not have found the scene in Daughter of Mystery as remarkable if I hadn't just had a very bad experience with The Dark Wife. The scene in The Dark Wife felt incredibly tone-deaf, but it was written and published years before the extensive discussions of Dead Lesbian Syndrome made the rounds in the wake of the mess with The 100. To some extent I felt like I was safer reading books about queer women written by queer women, but that clearly was not the case. If I'd known ahead of time what I was in for, I might not have had any issue with Daughter of Mystery, but I probably never would have read The Dark Wife. I'm so tempted to buckle down and write my own interpretation of a lesbian Persephone/Hades myth, but it would be hard to see it as anything other than a response to The Dark Wife, which of course it would be, and I hate talking shit about other authors' books.
Worst of all is the feeling I've walked away with that sexual assault is just seen as a normal part of a wlw romance. Like, what, you have to prove you're gay by not wanting to sleep with some dude before the story can continue?
I do want to stress once more that my objection is not to people writing about sexual assault at all. My objection is more than anything to being caught off guard by it, and to the difficulty of finding a story without it. Lots of women experience assault, and that's absolutely worth talking about, and people should be able to write about it and discuss it in fiction. But like . . . also, lots of women don't experience assault, and sometimes I just want to get away from it.
At the end of it all I still want to read some fluffy fantasy romances about queer women that don't contain sexual assault, and beyond a few recommendations acquired directly from other people I've spoken to, I have no idea where to start.
So. Writing, reading, how-to, dos and don'ts, recommendations, hapless flapping about trying to find the thread . . . Thoughts?
Before we go too much farther, I'm going to discuss the specifics of both books. If you don't wish to be spoiled on them, know that while both books are ultimately quite good, I do recommend Daughter of Mystery but I do not recommend The Dark Wife. The fact that I bring them up in the context of this discussion, of course, provides a minor spoiler in and of itself.
Spoilers for The Dark Wife (2011) by Sarah Diemer, the first of the two I read. It has excellent reviews basically everywhere and the concept is entirely up my alley.
This is a lesbian retelling of Persephone and Hades, and the characters are adorable, but it got off on the wrong foot immediately when a queer woman was added to the story to be Persephone's first girlfriend, only to be raped and murdered onscreen by Zeus on page eight. For the rest of the book, the primary factor driving the plot was Zeus's domestic abuse of the entire Olympian pantheon, culminating at the climax of the book when
Zeus impersonates Hades and tries to rape Persephone.
As I said in the discord: That is absolutely a fair, if not the fair, interpretation of Zeus. But it's not what I thought I was signing up for and I was not ready. And regardless of how horrible Zeus is, because yes, he is a awful, was it really necessary to add a queer woman to the beginning of the story and then have her raped and murdered (turned into a bush, specifically) in the first few pages? Because while that's absolutely a thing Zeus would do, it's not something he did in the original story; and while I support adding stuff in your interpretation of a story, that does mean that you are ultimately responsible for the stuff you added.
It might be relevant to mention that while Bury Your Gays has been a trope since forever, the big explosion in online discussions of it happened around 2015-16, about four or five years after this was published.
Ultimately, I picked up the book expecting and looking forward to a fluffy gay romance, and I got hit in the face with a bucket of sexual assault.
Now, spoilers for Daughter of Mystery (2014) by Heather Rose Jones. As I said before, I do still recommend this book, and am in fact reading the sequel right now.
This is a lesbian fantasy regency romance, complete with debutantes, mysterious pasts, fancy balls, and both court and courtroom politics. I loved it. I was so busy loving it, in fact, that I waved away several mentions of the possibility of sexual assault because I didn't think the book would go there. Then it did, on page 133 of 404, driving the transition to the second act. It was brief, relatively tasteful, and in my opinion fairly well-handled, and it dropped me into a black depression for days because all I wanted was to read a fluffy wlw romance without sexual assault in it. I ended up finishing it, and I'm glad I did, but I was still upset.
By the end of the book it was also revealed
that the entire reason Barbara learned to fight was because of an assault when she was ten
, while the perpetrator of the attack on page 133 went on to become a tentative friend and a minor but crucial ally when the shit hit the fan near the end.
Also, I'm reading the sequel The Mystic Marriage right now, and in chapter 1
one of the leads for the new romance finds herself needing to leave town in a hurry, and sleeps with a man she really doesn't want to sleep with in order to escape.
So that happened.As I said, I've been thinking about this experience ever since. Sexual assault hasn't historically been a major trigger for me, but it hit me hard as hell both times. I honestly wish it hadn't been present in either book, although in the case of The Dark Wife
that would have required an entirely new plot.
At the same time, I don't want to give the impression that I think sexual assault shouldn't be in books. I certainly don't want to make anybody feel like they can't write about it (and to be completely clear, I have no problem reading anybody's work that contains such scenes, but please provide me with a content warning).At first I thought I hadn't been paying enough attention to what I was buying. That would be in character, as I hate spoilers and I prefer to go into a book knowing as little as possible about it. But after I finished The Dark Wife I went looking for reviews that mentioned it at all, and I came away feeling like I was the only one who cared. I read review after review, by all kinds of people, praising the book for how wonderful it was. Hardly anybody seemed to find the assault elements worth mentioning. Most of the time when it was mentioned, it was either couched in vague terms ("I loved how she didn't shy away from making Zeus as bad as he was in the myths!") or was as part of a review that was essentially a recap of the entire story, which is the worst kind of review for me. I even encountered some that gushed about how she'd taken the rape elements of the original story out. Which, if you're comparing it to the "rape of Persephone" versions of the old myth, is technically accurate.
And yet, every time I've brought it up in discussions online, folks' reactions have been very similar to mine. It's frustrating, partially because it feels like the people reviewing the books find the scenes unremarkable, partially because it leaves me with no way forward if I want to know ahead of time if a book contains those sorts of scenes.
After I'd finished digging through reviews to no avail, I decided to sit back and really try to figure out why I was as upset as I was. As a writer myself, and as a member of a writing community, it seems worthwhile to at least try to figure out what's going on, because nobody wants a reader to have this kind of reaction to their story.
The honest truth is, I'm not sure. I might not have found the scene in Daughter of Mystery as remarkable if I hadn't just had a very bad experience with The Dark Wife. The scene in The Dark Wife felt incredibly tone-deaf, but it was written and published years before the extensive discussions of Dead Lesbian Syndrome made the rounds in the wake of the mess with The 100. To some extent I felt like I was safer reading books about queer women written by queer women, but that clearly was not the case. If I'd known ahead of time what I was in for, I might not have had any issue with Daughter of Mystery, but I probably never would have read The Dark Wife. I'm so tempted to buckle down and write my own interpretation of a lesbian Persephone/Hades myth, but it would be hard to see it as anything other than a response to The Dark Wife, which of course it would be, and I hate talking shit about other authors' books.
Worst of all is the feeling I've walked away with that sexual assault is just seen as a normal part of a wlw romance. Like, what, you have to prove you're gay by not wanting to sleep with some dude before the story can continue?
I do want to stress once more that my objection is not to people writing about sexual assault at all. My objection is more than anything to being caught off guard by it, and to the difficulty of finding a story without it. Lots of women experience assault, and that's absolutely worth talking about, and people should be able to write about it and discuss it in fiction. But like . . . also, lots of women don't experience assault, and sometimes I just want to get away from it.
At the end of it all I still want to read some fluffy fantasy romances about queer women that don't contain sexual assault, and beyond a few recommendations acquired directly from other people I've spoken to, I have no idea where to start.
So. Writing, reading, how-to, dos and don'ts, recommendations, hapless flapping about trying to find the thread . . . Thoughts?