Random thoughts

[telophase]

Random thought #1: one of the many, many books I'm partway trhough, that I pick up and read a couple of pages in every so often, is Rosemary Baird's Mistress of the House: Great Ladies and Grand Houses, about the women in charge of great English country houses during the 17th and 18th centuries. And when reading the chapters on how the mistress of a house was an accountant, office manager, interior designer, party planner, and patron of the arts, not to mention many other duties if she had to also serve at court, it makes me think.

I wonder why is it that so many Extruded Fantasy Product^[TM] novels star girls who are in roughly this social position, who complain about not being able to do anything or have fulfilling lives*, and who look forward to endless years of being merely decorative, and who complain about not being able to get along with other well-born girls whose brains are apparently vacuous enough that if you touched them their skulls would implode? Yeah, I know, it gets them out of the house and on to their Grand Plot-coupon Collecting Quest, but it'd be interesting for once to read a book in a domestic setting featuring a heroine who didn't mind doing all that, along with the acknowledgement that all these girls were being trained up to be more-or-less capable of handling all that stuff, and a stupid woman couldn't do it.

* I admit, interior designer and patron of the arts are the only parts of that job description that appeal to me, so I have a wee bit of sympathy there, especially since I am lousy at accounting and managerial stuff.


Random thought #2, which is something that I keep intending to post every so often, but since it usually occurs to me in the car I never get around to it.

In the Saiyuki fic that I've read, I think a lot never quite work for me because I don't see people capturing the internal metaphors of the characters when they're writing from that character's P.O.V. - their internal monologues all sound sort of the same, and I never feel that the characters have a distinct voice.

It's not speech patterns I'm referring to -- what I'm talking about isn't anything overt, but like what Lois McMaster Bujold does in her books that are told from the military-mad Miles' P.O.V. She chooses words that have military connotations when possible - Miles doesn't sit in a chair, he occupies it. Things like that. I've never seen Goku written in a way that acknowledges his obsession with food and eating in subtle ways like that - when it's brought up, it's always overt references to being hungry or abandoned or whatever. I don't think he'd read a book, he'd consume it. If it weren't that in canon he specifically refers to Sanzo's hair as being gold and Gojyo's hair as being fire-colored, I'd think that he might refer to those as buttery and cherry or tomato-red - he'd probably see other yellow and red things in those terms.

Gojyo would be similar, perhaps, but with words that refer to the sensual, sexual side of human nature. He wouldn't touch something but caress it, not whisper but mouth the words. Or something - he's harder to come up with stuff than Goku and I have not at all thought that instead of arriving somewhere he comes there, not at all.

Sanzo and Hakkai are harder, since their psychoses quirks are harder to get a handle on. But I'm sure there's ways to do it.

[ETA I talk about this a bit more in the comments.]

Mind you, I don't consume significant amounts of fic, so there's lots out there that I've missed, I'm sure, maybe stuff that actually does this.



And if you don't want to read all that, you can just watch Kougaiji copping a feel from Doku.

Comments

[marith.livejournal.com]

Is that the book where the grandmother repeats on almost every page, "Yes, truly you are my granddaughter," or some variation thereof? It was an interesting story, but that particular line drove me nuts. :)

(Also, I couldn't help suspecting it might have been originally written as a romance novel set in the French Revolution before being spraypainted with sf.)

[helen-keeble.livejournal.com]

It is indeed!

I have rather an unreasonable affection for the book, as it's one that I read obsessively at about the age of thirteen, and then subsequently completely forgot the title and author despite wanting to reread the neat semi-sentient machines (I'm an engineer; I think fantasy fiction needs more machine POV *grin*). So recognising the cover from across the library a decade later was an angels-are-showering-me-with-cherry-blossom-petals kind of moment.

And yes, the fantastical elements are, in many ways, very bolted-on. The order of magicians who conviently don't interact with the world at all, thus allowing the society to happily replicate French history withut inconvenient "why don't they just use magic?" questions...