Oh. Oh dear.
April 13, 2017 11:19 PM Subscribe
Producer Steven Paul’s (Ghost in the Shell, Ghost Rider) SP Entertainment Group is launching development of Piers Anthony's Xanth novels into both a feature film and a television series.
Relevant episode of I Don't Even Own a Television
TBH I read it as a kid and remember not a lot of that? I think I just liked it as fantasy adventure with a neat magic system. Then as an adult i hear Piers Anthony mentioned and people writhing in horror at the mention of Xanth so I google it and oh my fucking god.
FWIW I had no idea the other books even existed.
posted by Artw at 11:31 PM on April 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
TBH I read it as a kid and remember not a lot of that? I think I just liked it as fantasy adventure with a neat magic system. Then as an adult i hear Piers Anthony mentioned and people writhing in horror at the mention of Xanth so I google it and oh my fucking god.
FWIW I had no idea the other books even existed.
posted by Artw at 11:31 PM on April 13, 2017 [14 favorites]
The best one was Ogle, Ogle.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:42 PM on April 13, 2017 [10 favorites]
posted by ActingTheGoat at 11:42 PM on April 13, 2017 [10 favorites]
it's vitally important that any adaptation include the story of that kid who went to visit him, from This American Life
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:46 PM on April 13, 2017 [21 favorites]
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:46 PM on April 13, 2017 [21 favorites]
Nope.
posted by tzikeh at 12:17 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by tzikeh at 12:17 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I feel like this requires some variant of JOHN RINGO NO.
posted by mikurski at 12:18 AM on April 14, 2017 [24 favorites]
posted by mikurski at 12:18 AM on April 14, 2017 [24 favorites]
... are they time travelers? When they went to bed last night, it was the eighties? That's the only explanation I have.
I mean, over the last decade or so Anthony's sales have fallen to the point where he's gone to small presses to publish some of his work; Xanth is exactly the sort of rapey, giggly, brainless fantasy product that everyone I know in the field has been trying to get away from, and I haven't even seen any evidence of the alt-right Puppy types embracing Anthony, probably because he's only a clunky and well-meaning racist as opposed to an intentional one.
What market are these producers even aiming for? There's no real political intrigue, there aren't battles, there are so many puns that a lot of adults won't put up with them and there's way too much T&A for a kids' show. They're going to have to seriously rewrite the source material in one way or another, and it's difficult for me to imagine that they're going to manage that in a way that will make money nowadays, much less be in any way good.
Sigh.
I am fond of analyzing trainwrecks, so I have actually read several of Anthony's small press novels, as some libraries still purchase him because of his name status. The stories I could tell you about those books, the lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, the fretful porpentine give up and bugger off home to make a cup of tea. Such things are not for mortal ears.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 12:47 AM on April 14, 2017 [35 favorites]
I mean, over the last decade or so Anthony's sales have fallen to the point where he's gone to small presses to publish some of his work; Xanth is exactly the sort of rapey, giggly, brainless fantasy product that everyone I know in the field has been trying to get away from, and I haven't even seen any evidence of the alt-right Puppy types embracing Anthony, probably because he's only a clunky and well-meaning racist as opposed to an intentional one.
What market are these producers even aiming for? There's no real political intrigue, there aren't battles, there are so many puns that a lot of adults won't put up with them and there's way too much T&A for a kids' show. They're going to have to seriously rewrite the source material in one way or another, and it's difficult for me to imagine that they're going to manage that in a way that will make money nowadays, much less be in any way good.
Sigh.
I am fond of analyzing trainwrecks, so I have actually read several of Anthony's small press novels, as some libraries still purchase him because of his name status. The stories I could tell you about those books, the lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres, the fretful porpentine give up and bugger off home to make a cup of tea. Such things are not for mortal ears.
posted by Rush-That-Speaks at 12:47 AM on April 14, 2017 [35 favorites]
We get this drivel and I still don't have my Stainless Steel Rat adaptation? C'MON
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 1:17 AM on April 14, 2017 [37 favorites]
posted by Ten Cold Hot Dogs at 1:17 AM on April 14, 2017 [37 favorites]
We get this drivel and I still don't have my Stainless Steel Rat adaptation? C'MON
In the original Esperanto with English subtitles.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [30 favorites]
In the original Esperanto with English subtitles.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 1:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [30 favorites]
The best one was Ogle, Ogle.
Surely some prefer 'An HR Complaint for Chameleon,' or the later followup, 'The Color of Her Lawsuit.'
posted by mordax at 1:38 AM on April 14, 2017 [60 favorites]
Surely some prefer 'An HR Complaint for Chameleon,' or the later followup, 'The Color of Her Lawsuit.'
posted by mordax at 1:38 AM on April 14, 2017 [60 favorites]
Maybe this project will show as much respect for its source material as the Ghost in the Shell remake and end up being good.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 1:45 AM on April 14, 2017 [13 favorites]
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 1:45 AM on April 14, 2017 [13 favorites]
What market are these producers even aiming for?
The core idea of Xanth was good: everyone is born with a single magical talent. Some can only turn their pee purple, and others can manipulate space & time. Gives lots of room for maximum silliness so long as they rewrite everything from scratch and use nothing from the source other than the main concept and maybe a few of the less punny names. Probably will end up terrible anyways, but that's one way it might have a chance.
posted by honestcoyote at 1:59 AM on April 14, 2017 [13 favorites]
The core idea of Xanth was good: everyone is born with a single magical talent. Some can only turn their pee purple, and others can manipulate space & time. Gives lots of room for maximum silliness so long as they rewrite everything from scratch and use nothing from the source other than the main concept and maybe a few of the less punny names. Probably will end up terrible anyways, but that's one way it might have a chance.
posted by honestcoyote at 1:59 AM on April 14, 2017 [13 favorites]
I love P. Anthony... by which I mean Patricia. Although, when I was twelve and riding across country in a car with my family a Piers Anthony novel was probably what got me through the trip sane and only having one argument with my Grandmother where I called her Hitler.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:04 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:04 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
He did seem to have kind of an anal fetish. Weird reading some of his adult books when I was still a kid.
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:06 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by BrotherCaine at 2:06 AM on April 14, 2017
These books should be an anachronism to that old era before the end of the 90s when there stopped being social circles, both liberal and conservative, where open apology for pedophilia was still socially acceptable. No good can come of this aside from perhaps an end to both of these mens' careers.
When I was a middle schooler I picked up the Xanth series from a girl I was interested in who was obsessed with them. They seemed obsessed with the sexuality of children my age, but so was I at the time, and so it didn't seem that weird at first. They weren't really as interesting to me as the pretty equivalently trashy sci-fi I was into and, even if I was into puns, his didn't seem even vaguely clever. However, my eleven year old brain was thinking that, hey, here is this old dude who has clearly spent a hell of a lot more time than I've been alive thinking about the unformed sexuality of the other eleven year olds I was interested in - maybe I could learn something useful?
It wasn't until I read an essay he pasted into the back of one of the especially creepy books, I think it was The Color of Her Panties, defending himself from his 'prudish' detractors that I realized how PROFOUNDLY not ok any of this was. Even as young as I was I could tell exactly what perspective he was writing these books from, why he was writing these books, and suddenly once that next layer sank in, I could tell exactly why it was horrifying. I realized even at the time that the way in which the books were written almost as a guide to interpreting and integrating sexuality, which was all that really appealed to me along with how short and easy to digest they were, wasn't a guide for the reader to discover their own sexuality but instead a guide to discovering Piers Anthony's. These books are a pedophile's tools for grooming children. When I first encountered the story of the kid who went on his own to go see him I was particularly horrified until it became clear that the kid was male, because the books form such a clear guide to this dude's fetishes that the absence of any gaze directed at boys is palpable in the context of how much time Anthony spends obsessing over the bodies of prepubescent girls. Indeed, the only times that boys are portrayed sexually in any way is when they are used as obvious author inserts for abusing girls in various ways. Even as a pre-teen I had such a comprehensive knowledge of this man's kinks that I couldn't just rattle off a very long list of the things that turned him on, but could feel secure in excluding things, and holy shit is that not ok.
If the Xanth series along with most of what this dude has written are tools for grooming targets, Firefly and Tatham Mound are obvious tools for titillating, grooming, and excusing young pedophiles. In that link are some pretty graphic excerpts of explicit and unambiguous pedophilia apology from those books.
posted by Blasdelb at 2:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [49 favorites]
When I was a middle schooler I picked up the Xanth series from a girl I was interested in who was obsessed with them. They seemed obsessed with the sexuality of children my age, but so was I at the time, and so it didn't seem that weird at first. They weren't really as interesting to me as the pretty equivalently trashy sci-fi I was into and, even if I was into puns, his didn't seem even vaguely clever. However, my eleven year old brain was thinking that, hey, here is this old dude who has clearly spent a hell of a lot more time than I've been alive thinking about the unformed sexuality of the other eleven year olds I was interested in - maybe I could learn something useful?
It wasn't until I read an essay he pasted into the back of one of the especially creepy books, I think it was The Color of Her Panties, defending himself from his 'prudish' detractors that I realized how PROFOUNDLY not ok any of this was. Even as young as I was I could tell exactly what perspective he was writing these books from, why he was writing these books, and suddenly once that next layer sank in, I could tell exactly why it was horrifying. I realized even at the time that the way in which the books were written almost as a guide to interpreting and integrating sexuality, which was all that really appealed to me along with how short and easy to digest they were, wasn't a guide for the reader to discover their own sexuality but instead a guide to discovering Piers Anthony's. These books are a pedophile's tools for grooming children. When I first encountered the story of the kid who went on his own to go see him I was particularly horrified until it became clear that the kid was male, because the books form such a clear guide to this dude's fetishes that the absence of any gaze directed at boys is palpable in the context of how much time Anthony spends obsessing over the bodies of prepubescent girls. Indeed, the only times that boys are portrayed sexually in any way is when they are used as obvious author inserts for abusing girls in various ways. Even as a pre-teen I had such a comprehensive knowledge of this man's kinks that I couldn't just rattle off a very long list of the things that turned him on, but could feel secure in excluding things, and holy shit is that not ok.
If the Xanth series along with most of what this dude has written are tools for grooming targets, Firefly and Tatham Mound are obvious tools for titillating, grooming, and excusing young pedophiles. In that link are some pretty graphic excerpts of explicit and unambiguous pedophilia apology from those books.
Rush-That-Speaks: "What market are these producers even aiming for? There's no real political intrigue, there aren't battles, there are so many puns that a lot of adults won't put up with them and there's way too much T&A for a kids' show."Lets be clear here, there is almost no T or A in any of these books, the bodies portrayed as naked are almost always to young to even have them. The challenge of converting these books into a visual medium won't be keeping the rating down, it'll be keeping the result from being child porn. There are an awful lot of missing stairs in literary communities in general, and its time we stop whispering and tiptoeing around them. Like any reasonable adult who has read more than one of his books, you know full well that Piers Anthony is a pedophile using his position as an author to get his rocks off by grooming children, even if we can still hope that he has never abused one in person. A library refusing to stock these books isn't just censorship the way that a library not stocking a guide to home buying in a children's section would be, or the way that refusing to stock Maxim in a children's section would be, its censorship in the hilariously appropriate way that refusing to stock child porn in a children's section would be - because thats what these books are.
posted by Blasdelb at 2:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [49 favorites]
Gives lots of room for maximum silliness so long as they rewrite everything from scratch and use nothing from the source other than the main concept and maybe a few of the less punny names.
Sounds like a cat-ass-trophy.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 2:39 AM on April 14, 2017
Sounds like a cat-ass-trophy.
posted by ActingTheGoat at 2:39 AM on April 14, 2017
OK, I hate to be the voice of dissent here, but could we all please remember that he also wrote the greatest novel about interstellar dentistry ever seen by the eyes of man?
(Yes I post this comment in every Piers Anthony thread)
posted by Literaryhero at 3:02 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
(Yes I post this comment in every Piers Anthony thread)
posted by Literaryhero at 3:02 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
He did seem to have kind of an anal fetish.
He seemed to have kind of an everything fetish. The only reason I read MeFi threads about him is that I'm guaranteed at least one entirely new "Oh, shit, he did have an entire YA book about that kink, didn't he." realization.
posted by Etrigan at 3:19 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]
He seemed to have kind of an everything fetish. The only reason I read MeFi threads about him is that I'm guaranteed at least one entirely new "Oh, shit, he did have an entire YA book about that kink, didn't he." realization.
posted by Etrigan at 3:19 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]
Incarnations of Immortality, despite the diminishing returns as the series went on ("AH SATAN?" FUCK YOU), were formative books for me. I also really liked his Mute, but don't want to revisit it for fear of horrible realizations.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
posted by robocop is bleeding at 3:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
@Blasdelb Uuuggghhh. I had completely forgotten most of Piers Anthony, and now I know why I'd been happy to forget.
posted by XtinaS at 3:48 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by XtinaS at 3:48 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Wow. I had a whole shelf of PA, when I realized he had some kind of novel-writing factory running, and was set on cornering the market on bookstore space. They were all sounding alike, so I took all of mine except the original Battle Circle to the used-book store. This was before he started the Xanth series, so I guess I dodged all that squick.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:13 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by Kirth Gerson at 4:13 AM on April 14, 2017
He seemed to have kind of an everything fetish.
See also Jack Chalker. I don't recall Chalker being inappropriate about prepubescent kids, though.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:19 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
See also Jack Chalker. I don't recall Chalker being inappropriate about prepubescent kids, though.
posted by Faint of Butt at 4:19 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
Because I'm not sure where else to drop this, you know what sff work DOES deserve a miniseries? Mary Gentle's ASH: A Secret History, which manages to combine grim dark fantasy with female characters who have actual agency. PLUS, it's finished.
Not Xanth. If nothing else, the target demographic is probably missing at this stage.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:39 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]
Not Xanth. If nothing else, the target demographic is probably missing at this stage.
posted by steady-state strawberry at 4:39 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]
I've never read Anthony, but I am just beginning The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever by Stephen Donaldson... any clues as to what i'm in for?
OH GOD WHY DID HE RAPE LENA
WTF
posted by ELF Radio at 4:46 AM on April 14, 2017 [8 favorites]
OH GOD WHY DID HE RAPE LENA
WTF
posted by ELF Radio at 4:46 AM on April 14, 2017 [8 favorites]
> OH GOD WHY DID HE RAPE LENA
Basically to establish in a really clear way, right at the start, that he is not a nice or good guy. If you want a cold-blooded analysis of storywriting mechanics, here's a redemption narrative that starts with a pretty big challenge.
But still, I'm in full agreement, this could've been done without rape. It's not a tool a writer's toolkit needs. And twenty-odd years after having read the trilogy, that incident is the only thing I remember from it, and that's probably not what any writer wants to hear a reader say.
posted by ardgedee at 5:14 AM on April 14, 2017 [14 favorites]
Basically to establish in a really clear way, right at the start, that he is not a nice or good guy. If you want a cold-blooded analysis of storywriting mechanics, here's a redemption narrative that starts with a pretty big challenge.
But still, I'm in full agreement, this could've been done without rape. It's not a tool a writer's toolkit needs. And twenty-odd years after having read the trilogy, that incident is the only thing I remember from it, and that's probably not what any writer wants to hear a reader say.
posted by ardgedee at 5:14 AM on April 14, 2017 [14 favorites]
The thing that disturbs me about the Xanth novels is that they form a sort of gateway drug? Like, how do you do this without implicitly suggesting that people should go out and read Piers Anthony books? Hey, if you liked Xanth, we have all these other books for you!
Firefly is the obvious example of what's wrong, but it's not an outlier, is the thing. It's the most extreme example in his work but not by much. I say this as the sort of teenager who did in fact like the Xanth books and therefore went to find other Piers Anthony. I would call my experiences reading the Tarot and Apprentice Adept books formative, but not in a good way. I don't think YA authors should have to exclusively write for teenagers forever, but if all you've read is Xanth, I don't know that you necessarily are going to be aware how deeply messed up this guy's ideas about women and sexuality really are, and how completely pervasive those ideas are in his work.
I wanted to be sure I wasn't misremembering things about Tarot, because my recall of the actual plot was very hazy, and so went and found reference to the Tarot books: Additionally, the main female character exists almost solely to seduce men or be raped, and an adult man marries a 12-year-old girl. Okay, yup, as bad as I remembered it being. Xanth is only mildly icky in isolation, but it doesn't exist in isolation; it's the tip of a giant iceberg of awfulness.
posted by Sequence at 5:20 AM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
Firefly is the obvious example of what's wrong, but it's not an outlier, is the thing. It's the most extreme example in his work but not by much. I say this as the sort of teenager who did in fact like the Xanth books and therefore went to find other Piers Anthony. I would call my experiences reading the Tarot and Apprentice Adept books formative, but not in a good way. I don't think YA authors should have to exclusively write for teenagers forever, but if all you've read is Xanth, I don't know that you necessarily are going to be aware how deeply messed up this guy's ideas about women and sexuality really are, and how completely pervasive those ideas are in his work.
I wanted to be sure I wasn't misremembering things about Tarot, because my recall of the actual plot was very hazy, and so went and found reference to the Tarot books: Additionally, the main female character exists almost solely to seduce men or be raped, and an adult man marries a 12-year-old girl. Okay, yup, as bad as I remembered it being. Xanth is only mildly icky in isolation, but it doesn't exist in isolation; it's the tip of a giant iceberg of awfulness.
posted by Sequence at 5:20 AM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
See also Jack Chalker.
Nah. Jack Chalker knew what he liked, and what Jack Chalker liked was extreme bod-mod and body-swapping.
(Seriously, how many times can you write a sex scene between a character and their time-traveling quadruped clone?)
OH GOD WHY DID HE RAPE LENA
He's not just a rapist; he's going to spend about two-and-a-half books being all sad about being a rapist while everyone around him pats his hand and says, "there, there, you're not really a monster."
posted by jackbishop at 5:22 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]
Nah. Jack Chalker knew what he liked, and what Jack Chalker liked was extreme bod-mod and body-swapping.
(Seriously, how many times can you write a sex scene between a character and their time-traveling quadruped clone?)
OH GOD WHY DID HE RAPE LENA
He's not just a rapist; he's going to spend about two-and-a-half books being all sad about being a rapist while everyone around him pats his hand and says, "there, there, you're not really a monster."
posted by jackbishop at 5:22 AM on April 14, 2017 [11 favorites]
Wouldn't it be better to wait until something existed to link to it? What's the value in this couple of nearly-content free paragraphs?
posted by Wolfdog at 5:30 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by Wolfdog at 5:30 AM on April 14, 2017
They seemed obsessed with the sexuality of children my age, but so was I at the time, and so it didn't seem that weird at first.
That was my experience. I didn't pick up on the weirdness and grossness of it; I just aged out of it such that a year or two later smutty scenes about 11 year olds were no longer of interest to me, so I stopped reading his books. In retrospect, there was a very narrow window of time where I read his books, which indicates just how focused his pedo stuff is.
It's hard to imagine how to sufficiently bowdlerize his writing to keep the ok parts (the puns, the basic sword and sorcery adventure) without keeping a trace of the pedo themes. I don't envy the show's writers.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:31 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
That was my experience. I didn't pick up on the weirdness and grossness of it; I just aged out of it such that a year or two later smutty scenes about 11 year olds were no longer of interest to me, so I stopped reading his books. In retrospect, there was a very narrow window of time where I read his books, which indicates just how focused his pedo stuff is.
It's hard to imagine how to sufficiently bowdlerize his writing to keep the ok parts (the puns, the basic sword and sorcery adventure) without keeping a trace of the pedo themes. I don't envy the show's writers.
posted by Dip Flash at 5:31 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
Wolfdog, I think it's about the track record of both these dudes, and also allows us to remind each other that blech.
When I was a kid, I was so alternately sheltered and traumatized (not by horrific things, just benign neglect) that I skipped over the icky parts of lots of books and assumed that I was the problem. So these discussions are always really helpful to me.
posted by allthinky at 5:42 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
When I was a kid, I was so alternately sheltered and traumatized (not by horrific things, just benign neglect) that I skipped over the icky parts of lots of books and assumed that I was the problem. So these discussions are always really helpful to me.
posted by allthinky at 5:42 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
"Xanth is only mildly icky in isolation, but it doesn't exist in isolation; it's the tip of a giant iceberg of awfulness."Thats kind of what really gets me about the modern hierography of Xanth though, it can only be considered mildly icky in comparison to the lurid child rape erotica and textually explicit apology that it is the gateway to, even in isolation it is profoundly fucking awful. Even when you set aside how the child abuse themes are only toned down so as to be more developmentally targeted to the developmental age being predated on within them, those themes are still pervasive throughout the books and inherently rapey.
Its almost like so many of us who were reading this kind of fiction, or watching Calvin Klein commercials, or attending schools with those kinds of teachers, or loved those kinds of pop-stars, or had families with those kinds of uncles, or went to churches with those kinds of priests, before the 90s ended have been gaslit into thinking that there is such a thing as mild themes of pedophilia erotica or apology.
posted by Blasdelb at 5:59 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
If the Xanth series along with most of what this dude has written are tools for grooming targets, Firefly and Tatham Mound are obvious tools for titillating, grooming, and excusing young pedophiles. In that link are some pretty graphic excerpts of explicit and unambiguous pedophilia apology from those books.
I keep forgetting how truly gross and awful he got, and then someone posts that link about Firefly (for those who don't click through, there's a "sex scene" with a five year old and subsequent exoneration of the rapist because the five year old led him on).
posted by corb at 6:00 AM on April 14, 2017
I keep forgetting how truly gross and awful he got, and then someone posts that link about Firefly (for those who don't click through, there's a "sex scene" with a five year old and subsequent exoneration of the rapist because the five year old led him on).
posted by corb at 6:00 AM on April 14, 2017
This post is making me glad(?) that the weirdest I ever got with adolescent lit was V. C. Andrews.
Jesus.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:02 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]
Jesus.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:02 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]
I owned all of the Xanth books up to a certain point where I got tired of them, and the thing that is interesting to me about this discussion is that the way I read and enjoyed the books is…mostly the same way I manage to enjoy anything else in most of popular culture.
The grossness of Xanth books is mostly based on the pedophilia aspects, and yes, it is wildly egregious. But as a pre-teen and teen girl reading them, the method of reading that was “read the fun parts until you get to something gross, skim it to get it over with, then keep reading to follow the plot” is STILL, to this day, how I am forced to consume most media products. Usually it is just garden variety misogyny, sometimes straight up rape (also a problem in the Xanth books), but it is hard thinking of a popular cultural text that doesn’t still force me to at least occasionally use this strategy as a reader/watcher.
It is a strategy that affects the way I remember the books, actually. I loved the idea of more/less ogre-ishness in Ogre, Ogre. I loved the plot of Crewel Lye where you could time travel using the tapestry and also be best friends with a horse-sized spider who got caught along the way. I loved when they had to travel to Mundania (is that what it was called?) to find Grey, whose power was de-magicking things. And I was so accustomed to every single book and show and movie in the world telling me disgusting things about myself, that it was usually just part of the background noise.
I’m not trying to be a Piers Anthony or Xanth apologist by any means— especially since a female friend of mine ALSO took a long road trip to meet him at his house (her parents were with her, so it was still weird but I guess that was something a lot of his acolytes did? Um?), and I still get a sick feeling when I remember the horrifying rape “trial” in A Spell for Chameleon (verdict: beautiful women deserve to be raped and publicly humiliated for it), and basically Xanth has been completely ruined by how overwhelming its grossness is.
But I do have to say that when I was young, the idea that I might be able to regularly find books that didn’t occasionally make me feel humiliated and vulnerable and horrible was just— nonexistent. I didn’t really have the discernment to distinguish between horrifying pedophilia plotlines and horrifying regular grownup misogyny plotlines. It was just the price I had to pay for wanting to read or watch anything.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 6:21 AM on April 14, 2017 [54 favorites]
The grossness of Xanth books is mostly based on the pedophilia aspects, and yes, it is wildly egregious. But as a pre-teen and teen girl reading them, the method of reading that was “read the fun parts until you get to something gross, skim it to get it over with, then keep reading to follow the plot” is STILL, to this day, how I am forced to consume most media products. Usually it is just garden variety misogyny, sometimes straight up rape (also a problem in the Xanth books), but it is hard thinking of a popular cultural text that doesn’t still force me to at least occasionally use this strategy as a reader/watcher.
It is a strategy that affects the way I remember the books, actually. I loved the idea of more/less ogre-ishness in Ogre, Ogre. I loved the plot of Crewel Lye where you could time travel using the tapestry and also be best friends with a horse-sized spider who got caught along the way. I loved when they had to travel to Mundania (is that what it was called?) to find Grey, whose power was de-magicking things. And I was so accustomed to every single book and show and movie in the world telling me disgusting things about myself, that it was usually just part of the background noise.
I’m not trying to be a Piers Anthony or Xanth apologist by any means— especially since a female friend of mine ALSO took a long road trip to meet him at his house (her parents were with her, so it was still weird but I guess that was something a lot of his acolytes did? Um?), and I still get a sick feeling when I remember the horrifying rape “trial” in A Spell for Chameleon (verdict: beautiful women deserve to be raped and publicly humiliated for it), and basically Xanth has been completely ruined by how overwhelming its grossness is.
But I do have to say that when I was young, the idea that I might be able to regularly find books that didn’t occasionally make me feel humiliated and vulnerable and horrible was just— nonexistent. I didn’t really have the discernment to distinguish between horrifying pedophilia plotlines and horrifying regular grownup misogyny plotlines. It was just the price I had to pay for wanting to read or watch anything.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 6:21 AM on April 14, 2017 [54 favorites]
Yeah, the only thing of Anthony's that I've delved into at all was a copy of Firefly that I skimmed through at an acquaintance's yard sale and decided not to buy, for the reasons mentioned above, and that discouraged me from picking up anything else of his, ever again. My guess as to why this has been picked up for development is that TV producers are sufficiently desperate for properties to develop that they're willing to risk negative blowback for the decision; given that the producer is also the guy who whitewashed Ghost in the Shell (which seems to have flopped), that may not be enough of a disincentive.
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:34 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by Halloween Jack at 6:34 AM on April 14, 2017
> "I loved the plot of Crewel Lye where you could time travel using the tapestry and also be best friends with a horse-sized spider who got caught along the way."
I think this was actually Castle Roogna and knowing this makes me feel bad about myself and my life choices.
posted by kyrademon at 6:37 AM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
I think this was actually Castle Roogna and knowing this makes me feel bad about myself and my life choices.
posted by kyrademon at 6:37 AM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
Uuggh, Firefly, aka the most horrifying thing Piers Anthony has ever written
posted by zakur at 6:38 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by zakur at 6:38 AM on April 14, 2017
honestcoyote: "The core idea of Xanth was good: everyone is born with a single magical talent. Some can only turn their pee purple, and others can manipulate space & time. "
Which is essentially the premise of the Care Bears and that makes serious bank. I've seen so many adaptations of books that bear only a passing resemblance to the source material (Starship Troopers anyone?) that I wouldn't be automatically dismissive of the show just because the source material was icky. Though nowadays I'd be kind of concerned Anthony is going to make money from my viewing.
posted by Mitheral at 7:08 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Which is essentially the premise of the Care Bears and that makes serious bank. I've seen so many adaptations of books that bear only a passing resemblance to the source material (Starship Troopers anyone?) that I wouldn't be automatically dismissive of the show just because the source material was icky. Though nowadays I'd be kind of concerned Anthony is going to make money from my viewing.
posted by Mitheral at 7:08 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
"Why not just rip off X-Men?" seems like a good question. Look, "X-men but pseudo-medieval and everyone is a mutant", there's your pitch, give me $$$$$$.
posted by Artw at 7:15 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by Artw at 7:15 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
"What if everyone was a fast zombie, but had a different speed?"
posted by fatbird at 7:23 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
posted by fatbird at 7:23 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
"It's hard to imagine how to sufficiently bowdlerize his writing to keep the ok parts (the puns, the basic sword and sorcery adventure) without keeping a trace of the pedo themes. I don't envy the show's writers."There really isn't much there there to the basic sword and sorcery adventure aspect, and puns like those can't be translated to a visual medium. Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I wouldn't be surprised if the point of purchasing the Xanth name was to profit from the only genuinely notable thing about it, though I imagine they'd use older actors if only for legal reasons.
posted by Blasdelb at 7:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
My thoughts immediately go right to Chthon, which is Oedipus Rex with an even creepier BDSM species that must be physically abused, the series where most of the plot involved psychics projected into alien bodies (I'll give it points for them being something other than humans with forehead makeup) forced to have weird sex through plot devices, and someone using an inter-dimensional telescope to ogle orchestras of naked women. Unfortunately it took much too long to figure out exactly why those plot devices were creepy.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:49 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:49 AM on April 14, 2017
I bet that they'll change it just enough to make it legal and acceptable to mainstream audiences, with the result that it will still be deeply sexist and troubling.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:50 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 7:50 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
I didn’t really have the discernment to distinguish between horrifying pedophilia plotlines and horrifying regular grownup misogyny plotlines. It was just the price I had to pay for wanting to read or watch anything.
Please take all of my favorites, forever and ever.
I was all set to congratulate myself on never having read Piers Anthony, and then I remembered I read The Mists of Avalon at like...eight years old.
I think maybe this is why I am also entirely out of misogynist-fucks to give. The 80s and 90s were really expensive, misogynist-fucks wise.
And it still ain't cheap anywhere.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:50 AM on April 14, 2017 [20 favorites]
Please take all of my favorites, forever and ever.
I was all set to congratulate myself on never having read Piers Anthony, and then I remembered I read The Mists of Avalon at like...eight years old.
I think maybe this is why I am also entirely out of misogynist-fucks to give. The 80s and 90s were really expensive, misogynist-fucks wise.
And it still ain't cheap anywhere.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:50 AM on April 14, 2017 [20 favorites]
And I should state: there are nuances to how and why some stuff becomes creepy. (Not talking about the pedophilia here, because what the fucking fuck.) A lot of these same plot devices are used in romance subgenres, and while -- let's be honest -- quite a few of those still manage to be creepy and terrible, the gaze of the narrative and the agency of the characters matters. But that's not something you would ever be able to grok if you didn't accept the idea that sexism and misogyny exist and are harmful, and that women are in fact people with their own internal worlds and set of experiences. So...a lot of SFF...just isn't going to get it.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:55 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by schadenfrau at 7:55 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
What market are these producers even aiming for? There's no real political intrigue, there aren't battles, there are so many puns that a lot of adults won't put up with them and there's way too much T&A for a kids' show. They're going to have to seriously rewrite the source material in one way or another, and it's difficult for me to imagine that they're going to manage that in a way that will make money nowadays, much less be in any way good.
The thing is, the books do have a bunch of clever concepts and story engines that would be great for TV: that everyone has a unique power, the wise magician you can ask one question if you pass three puzzle challenges and agree to some kind of service, the guy who talks to inanimate objects which are generally ornery and dumb as rocks, the centaur who can bring a narrow zone of magic into mundania, using ghosts as hooks for stories set in the past, even Ivy's thing of transforming people into who she imagines them to be could be interesting if used as horror rather than a metaphor for "behind every man is a woman who belieeeeves in him" crap.
Where I predict they will crash and burn is with Chameleon. I suspect that someone who doesn't realize that Xanth is irredeemably tainted by Anthony's creepy misogyny will think there's actually something clever in that misogynistic train wreck of a character concept and will try to include her since she's the title character of the first book. And there's just no version of Chameleon that wouldn't be a complete disaster.
posted by straight at 7:57 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
The thing is, the books do have a bunch of clever concepts and story engines that would be great for TV: that everyone has a unique power, the wise magician you can ask one question if you pass three puzzle challenges and agree to some kind of service, the guy who talks to inanimate objects which are generally ornery and dumb as rocks, the centaur who can bring a narrow zone of magic into mundania, using ghosts as hooks for stories set in the past, even Ivy's thing of transforming people into who she imagines them to be could be interesting if used as horror rather than a metaphor for "behind every man is a woman who belieeeeves in him" crap.
Where I predict they will crash and burn is with Chameleon. I suspect that someone who doesn't realize that Xanth is irredeemably tainted by Anthony's creepy misogyny will think there's actually something clever in that misogynistic train wreck of a character concept and will try to include her since she's the title character of the first book. And there's just no version of Chameleon that wouldn't be a complete disaster.
posted by straight at 7:57 AM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
Jack Chalker knew what he liked, and what Jack Chalker liked was extreme bod-mod and body-swapping.
For a while as a teen I was hugely into the Well World books,* even to the point of trying to run a Well World RPG, but it was only years later that I twigged to the fact that Chalker really liked bodily transformations. By itself that's harmless enough, I suppose, and as someone who went through phases of their own body unhappiness, maybe it was part of an unconscious appeal.
John Clute's appraisal seems kind:
I (probably fortunately) never got into Xanth or much into Anthony at all. I am also baffled by why anyone would imagine them a rich source to mine.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:03 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
For a while as a teen I was hugely into the Well World books,* even to the point of trying to run a Well World RPG, but it was only years later that I twigged to the fact that Chalker really liked bodily transformations. By itself that's harmless enough, I suppose, and as someone who went through phases of their own body unhappiness, maybe it was part of an unconscious appeal.
John Clute's appraisal seems kind:
"Chalker was a novelist of considerable flair, with an ear acutely attuned to the secret dreams of freedom mortals tend to dream, but was prone to sometimes gross and compulsively repetitive overproduction ..."(*I've only just now discovered that he wrote two additional Well World books at the turn of the century. Don't feel like I need to rush out and get them.)
I (probably fortunately) never got into Xanth or much into Anthony at all. I am also baffled by why anyone would imagine them a rich source to mine.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:03 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah, a big part of the problem with the entire series is that it is built on the foundation of who Chameleon is, and she reappears in multiple storylines, and it is like this strain of horrible poison even in otherwise lighthearted events. For those of you who have no intention of reading these books, here's a brief and based on 20-year old recollections summary:
The first novel is about Bink, who is going to be exiled from Xanth because he doesn’t have a magical power, which makes him a freak outcast who is constantly almost murdered because of it. You are supposed to identify with him because this is so unfair, but he is also a disgusting grossball who semi-stalks this girl from his village, likes to stare at centaur breasts, and once tried to “sow wild oats” which means sowing magic oats that grow a mindless sex nymph who you can molest indefinitely? I don’t know I haven’t read it in a long while.
Anyway, he goes on a quest to see if he can get a magic power. Along the way, he meets two women. One is stunningly, rape-inducingly beautiful (he meets her when he is forced to become part of the court at a rape trial where her assailants are told that they can’t be blamed because her beauty is so overwhelming), but also painfully, terrifyingly stupid. The other one is hard-to-look-at-ugly, but brilliant— which means that she saves his life sometimes, but also that he kinds of hates her, because women being right about things makes him angry.
Anyway, it turns out both women are the same woman, who transitions from beautiful and dumb to smart and ugly on a monthly cycle (GEDDIT), and she has been searching for a spell to keep herself in the middle. A spell to rid herself of her “time of the month!” HA HA WOMEN AMIRITE
SPOILER ALERT: Bink is one of the most powerful magicians in Xanth, because his power is that he can’t be hurt by magic, which makes him nigh-invulnerable. Worse, more upsetting spoiler alert: he goes to the bone zone with Chameleon, and he decides he’s in love with her because only having one woman for the rest of his life would be horrible misery, but she changes every day. So the titular spell for Chameleon is love? Except not really, because he seems to hate her when she’s ugly and smart?
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:18 AM on April 14, 2017 [14 favorites]
The first novel is about Bink, who is going to be exiled from Xanth because he doesn’t have a magical power, which makes him a freak outcast who is constantly almost murdered because of it. You are supposed to identify with him because this is so unfair, but he is also a disgusting grossball who semi-stalks this girl from his village, likes to stare at centaur breasts, and once tried to “sow wild oats” which means sowing magic oats that grow a mindless sex nymph who you can molest indefinitely? I don’t know I haven’t read it in a long while.
Anyway, he goes on a quest to see if he can get a magic power. Along the way, he meets two women. One is stunningly, rape-inducingly beautiful (he meets her when he is forced to become part of the court at a rape trial where her assailants are told that they can’t be blamed because her beauty is so overwhelming), but also painfully, terrifyingly stupid. The other one is hard-to-look-at-ugly, but brilliant— which means that she saves his life sometimes, but also that he kinds of hates her, because women being right about things makes him angry.
Anyway, it turns out both women are the same woman, who transitions from beautiful and dumb to smart and ugly on a monthly cycle (GEDDIT), and she has been searching for a spell to keep herself in the middle. A spell to rid herself of her “time of the month!” HA HA WOMEN AMIRITE
SPOILER ALERT: Bink is one of the most powerful magicians in Xanth, because his power is that he can’t be hurt by magic, which makes him nigh-invulnerable. Worse, more upsetting spoiler alert: he goes to the bone zone with Chameleon, and he decides he’s in love with her because only having one woman for the rest of his life would be horrible misery, but she changes every day. So the titular spell for Chameleon is love? Except not really, because he seems to hate her when she’s ugly and smart?
posted by a fiendish thingy at 8:18 AM on April 14, 2017 [14 favorites]
I read Xanth in the pre-taste era of my youth, and loved them, and got bored after that early teens window closed. For the record I am female and identified myself as a feminist even then. I don't recall the specifics of the books although I knew they were sexist - I let my kid read the first few, I actually suggested them to her as she likes puns and magic too. She reads widely including older books that include racism, antisemitism, etc, and we talk and dialog a lot about sexism, power dynamics, etc. She has a pretty sophisticated analysis of the world, so I guess I feel like she can read a lot of different things and relate to them differently and articulate a thoughtful critique even if she gets enjoyment out of aspects of the material. I know I wouldn't be able to tolerate reading the Xanth books now, and I didn't know about the most extreme of his books, but I'm not sure what I think about what I'm reading.
I also read a lot of Ann Rice in my early teens, including Belinda, her novel about sex between a teen and an adult. I confess I found it titillating and I'm not sure how to fully analyze pedophelic fantasy when it's found in fiction. I don't think a writer's use of that necessarily indicates anything about their behavior.
I don't know anything about Peirs Anthony as a person, and would definitely believe it if someone told me he was an abuser, but as far as I know these are products of his brain not his actions. I think it would be wrong for me to just excuse his writing: paired with the sexism, I think it's pretty clear that his fiction reflects real beliefs and perspectives that suck. But I'm not clear what it means when fiction writers write fiction that presents troubling images.
There's a whole world of porn out there that is also quite disturbing if taken as a statement of the makers actual intent or beliefs.
posted by latkes at 8:26 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]
I also read a lot of Ann Rice in my early teens, including Belinda, her novel about sex between a teen and an adult. I confess I found it titillating and I'm not sure how to fully analyze pedophelic fantasy when it's found in fiction. I don't think a writer's use of that necessarily indicates anything about their behavior.
I don't know anything about Peirs Anthony as a person, and would definitely believe it if someone told me he was an abuser, but as far as I know these are products of his brain not his actions. I think it would be wrong for me to just excuse his writing: paired with the sexism, I think it's pretty clear that his fiction reflects real beliefs and perspectives that suck. But I'm not clear what it means when fiction writers write fiction that presents troubling images.
There's a whole world of porn out there that is also quite disturbing if taken as a statement of the makers actual intent or beliefs.
posted by latkes at 8:26 AM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]
In terms of this adaption, it just seems like the entire universe of creative work now just exists to be turned into a brand, mined for any nostalgic emotion consumers have for the original. Source material is almost irrelevant to what it gets adapted into, as long as it provides a medium for embedded advertising and can be used to sell tie in products.
posted by latkes at 8:27 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by latkes at 8:27 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
I'm reminded of that part in Constantine's Sword where James Carroll reaches the somewhat alarming conclusion that antisemitism can never be fully excised from Christianity because the gospels, themselves, were written after the Council of Jerusalem and contain the progenetive roots of antisemitism.
Xanth is like that, but with misogyny.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:29 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
Xanth is like that, but with misogyny.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 8:29 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I suspect that a chunk of motivation involves mining 70s/80s nostalgia as a cash cow.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 8:30 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
My bet is that they have little interest in the actual books except as a "sexy comedy fantasy" framework to hang the show on - dollars to doughnuts the phrase "Game of Thrones only funny" has already been spoken in one development meeting or pitch. Fantasy is big right now, here's a series of books that have sold millions which, if you only skim & summarize, are "funny" and "titillating", and producers are notorious for buying rights to works based on a cursory understanding of the original and with no intentions of hewing closely to it.
Which is to say, yes, it's horrible that Anthony is getting more money for his pedo fantasy, and worse that he'll get more sales of the books if the film or shows ever actually happen. But for those people wondering how you faithfully adapt the books without including the gross creepy stuff, the answer is you don't give a shit about faithfully adapting the books. Keep the names, a few puns, the thing about everyone having one magic talent, then just barrel ahead making a comedy fantasy with lots of nudity. It'll likely be bad, and sexist as hell, but they may well avoid the pedophilia element simply by not knowing or caring much about the source material.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
Which is to say, yes, it's horrible that Anthony is getting more money for his pedo fantasy, and worse that he'll get more sales of the books if the film or shows ever actually happen. But for those people wondering how you faithfully adapt the books without including the gross creepy stuff, the answer is you don't give a shit about faithfully adapting the books. Keep the names, a few puns, the thing about everyone having one magic talent, then just barrel ahead making a comedy fantasy with lots of nudity. It'll likely be bad, and sexist as hell, but they may well avoid the pedophilia element simply by not knowing or caring much about the source material.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
then just barrel ahead making a comedy fantasy with lots of nudity.
That seems a disaster in the making once "based on the novels of Piers Anthony" sends columnists looking for the next hot take back to the books.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:39 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
That seems a disaster in the making once "based on the novels of Piers Anthony" sends columnists looking for the next hot take back to the books.
posted by octobersurprise at 8:39 AM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
Previously on MeFi: Revisiting the sad, misogynistic fantasy of Xanth
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:46 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by Atom Eyes at 8:46 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
'Ok, we need a idea for our new show on the TV'
'The SciFi and other made up stuff seems big right now. Let's go to a bookstore before they all close forever'
'Oh look there is shelves of just this one guy! Even before we get to B! We have TV show forever!'
'Should we read one of them first?'
'Why bother? They not be here if they not good, right?'
posted by sexyrobot at 8:48 AM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
'The SciFi and other made up stuff seems big right now. Let's go to a bookstore before they all close forever'
'Oh look there is shelves of just this one guy! Even before we get to B! We have TV show forever!'
'Should we read one of them first?'
'Why bother? They not be here if they not good, right?'
posted by sexyrobot at 8:48 AM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
I think I read like one Xanth novel, and I disliked it so much I didn't even put it on my book list at the time. Reading that book was just one more thing about the particular relationship I was in (my then-boyfriend loved Piers Anthony and had lent it to me) that made me feel icky.
posted by limeonaire at 9:04 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by limeonaire at 9:04 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
I don't think a writer's use of that necessarily indicates anything about their behavior.
Well, yeah, sure - but as you said, it's pretty clear where Piers Anthony was coming from. It comes through in his work. His narratives are constructed to support a set of fucked up beliefs and desires - ones that exist in the real world and can cause tremendous suffering.
Anthony may never have molested as single child, but let's be realistic; he was no Nabokov. He didn't set out to create unreliable narrators whose beliefs and desires would be critiqued by the narrative. He simply thought that what he was writing was hot. And his narratives are pretty standard apologia for it - he makes children willing, and responsible, in ways that real-world pedophiles fantasize they are. It's just so transparent. He was not a good enough author for it to be otherwise.
(And on the more general question about troubling images in art - I don't think you can address it without also addressing the effect on girls reading it. What was that study that showed that with media exposure, boys' self-esteem goes up and girls' self-esteem goes down?)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:05 AM on April 14, 2017 [15 favorites]
Well, yeah, sure - but as you said, it's pretty clear where Piers Anthony was coming from. It comes through in his work. His narratives are constructed to support a set of fucked up beliefs and desires - ones that exist in the real world and can cause tremendous suffering.
Anthony may never have molested as single child, but let's be realistic; he was no Nabokov. He didn't set out to create unreliable narrators whose beliefs and desires would be critiqued by the narrative. He simply thought that what he was writing was hot. And his narratives are pretty standard apologia for it - he makes children willing, and responsible, in ways that real-world pedophiles fantasize they are. It's just so transparent. He was not a good enough author for it to be otherwise.
(And on the more general question about troubling images in art - I don't think you can address it without also addressing the effect on girls reading it. What was that study that showed that with media exposure, boys' self-esteem goes up and girls' self-esteem goes down?)
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:05 AM on April 14, 2017 [15 favorites]
Huh, for some reason I thought he had died recently. The fact that he will be making even more money off of this property, which throws young girls under the bus for the sake of his old man boner - it makes me sad and angry.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:13 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 9:13 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
He actually had some talent - he was nominated for a Nebula and twice for the Hugo. There are some reasonably interesting ideas in Macroscope. Pity he decided to focus his energies on being a huge creep.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:20 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by Chrysostom at 9:20 AM on April 14, 2017
(And on the more general question about troubling images in art - I don't think you can address it without also addressing the effect on girls reading it. What was that study that showed that with media exposure, boys' self-esteem goes up and girls' self-esteem goes down?)
Yeah this is a valid point and I know anecdote does not equal representative sample but I was an adolescent girl when I read Xanth (and Belinda, and for that matter Lolita) and... for me I think perhaps because I was reading lots of other stuff and had other influences, I don't think it was harmful, I think I enjoyed it.
posted by latkes at 9:21 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Yeah this is a valid point and I know anecdote does not equal representative sample but I was an adolescent girl when I read Xanth (and Belinda, and for that matter Lolita) and... for me I think perhaps because I was reading lots of other stuff and had other influences, I don't think it was harmful, I think I enjoyed it.
posted by latkes at 9:21 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
I haven't read Firefly. Is it actually worse than Bio of a Space Tyrant? Which, honestly, I'm surprised not have seen already mentioned in this thread of horribleness.
posted by hanov3r at 9:23 AM on April 14, 2017
posted by hanov3r at 9:23 AM on April 14, 2017
I was an adolescent girl when I read Xanth (and Belinda, and for that matter Lolita) and... for me I think perhaps because I was reading lots of other stuff and had other influences, I don't think it was harmful, I think I enjoyed it.
To make my own position clear in response to this point: I don't think that enjoyment and harm are mutually exclusive. I loved Xanth books, and I hunted them down in used bookstores to read, and I talked about them with my friends and had favorite plot points and characters. I found them to be mostly lighthearted and fun.
But I still think they messed me up (in concert with everything else I was reading). I look back at a lot of my favorite books and movies and I can see direct lines between those narratives and my own suffering years later where I tried to make sense of the world and my place in it after having grown up hearing constant messaging that had very ugly things to say about "this is what women are for".
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:29 AM on April 14, 2017 [24 favorites]
To make my own position clear in response to this point: I don't think that enjoyment and harm are mutually exclusive. I loved Xanth books, and I hunted them down in used bookstores to read, and I talked about them with my friends and had favorite plot points and characters. I found them to be mostly lighthearted and fun.
But I still think they messed me up (in concert with everything else I was reading). I look back at a lot of my favorite books and movies and I can see direct lines between those narratives and my own suffering years later where I tried to make sense of the world and my place in it after having grown up hearing constant messaging that had very ugly things to say about "this is what women are for".
posted by a fiendish thingy at 9:29 AM on April 14, 2017 [24 favorites]
I think three things come to mind with interpreting Anthony. The first is that his fetish elements are pervasive throughout his fiction, which I think wouldn't be such a bad thing if it were shelved with more explicitly kinky works. But I remember some of it getting into YA shelves.
SFF is huge and diverse. Like many people, I have a speciality, which is feminist and LGBTQ-inclusive work. And I think there's a difference between how Tepper, Okorafor, Jemisin, Butler, and others deal with literal and metaphorical rape on the page as a bad feature of systemic problems opposed to Anthony's wink-wink-nudge-nudge subtext. Butler's alien three-ways are traumatic (to different degrees) for the humans involved, while Anthony's narratives tend to support a rape-culture view that some people need a good lay for their own good. In more honest moments, Anthony can be as blunt about that as Gor. (Houseplants of Gor, a satire of Gor ideas about consent.)
And the third issue is that there's a lot of male-gaze titillation going on.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:33 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
SFF is huge and diverse. Like many people, I have a speciality, which is feminist and LGBTQ-inclusive work. And I think there's a difference between how Tepper, Okorafor, Jemisin, Butler, and others deal with literal and metaphorical rape on the page as a bad feature of systemic problems opposed to Anthony's wink-wink-nudge-nudge subtext. Butler's alien three-ways are traumatic (to different degrees) for the humans involved, while Anthony's narratives tend to support a rape-culture view that some people need a good lay for their own good. In more honest moments, Anthony can be as blunt about that as Gor. (Houseplants of Gor, a satire of Gor ideas about consent.)
And the third issue is that there's a lot of male-gaze titillation going on.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 9:33 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
When we were kids, my older brother got really into reading fantasy novels—LotR, Thomas Covenant, the Conan books—and since I wanted to emulate him but was a bit too young to handle more dense fare, I started reading the Xanth series. I probably got through 7 or 8 of them before I eventually graduated to Tolkien, and then there was no looking back.
At the time I was into them, I did get enjoyment out of them—less from the characters and puns than just the general milieu of magic and scenery and adventure. (To be honest, I think what I liked most about them was the cover art, which was strikingly well done.) I definitely noticed the weird emphasis on sexuality of the young characters, but as an adolescent reader myself, those were things I was already curious about so it didn't seem too egregious. But with each new book, those sequences started more and more to stick out like a sore thumb, until I finally reached the point of "Really?? You're bringing the action to a screeching halt just so you can squeeze in yet another several passages of breathlessly detailed descriptions of some young pixie's perky butt?"
And so I moved on to Middle Earth where, of course, there is no such thing as human genitalia.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
At the time I was into them, I did get enjoyment out of them—less from the characters and puns than just the general milieu of magic and scenery and adventure. (To be honest, I think what I liked most about them was the cover art, which was strikingly well done.) I definitely noticed the weird emphasis on sexuality of the young characters, but as an adolescent reader myself, those were things I was already curious about so it didn't seem too egregious. But with each new book, those sequences started more and more to stick out like a sore thumb, until I finally reached the point of "Really?? You're bringing the action to a screeching halt just so you can squeeze in yet another several passages of breathlessly detailed descriptions of some young pixie's perky butt?"
And so I moved on to Middle Earth where, of course, there is no such thing as human genitalia.
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:35 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
Damn, I really liked the Xanth series, and also the Incarnations of Immortality series. I read them as a teenager, and I spent hours reading those books. Maybe it's because I was younger, but I never caught on to the themes of misogyny and pedophilia that are mentioned multiple times in the comments.
Disappointing, because initially, I was excited...I thought the world of Xanth was great (as I remembered it.) Now I see all these comments, and I'm like "what the fuck?" Piers Anthony is not cool? Xanth is not cool?
Damn.
posted by KillaSeal at 10:04 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Disappointing, because initially, I was excited...I thought the world of Xanth was great (as I remembered it.) Now I see all these comments, and I'm like "what the fuck?" Piers Anthony is not cool? Xanth is not cool?
Damn.
posted by KillaSeal at 10:04 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
And then there's also Blue Adept where the protagonist wins the climactic contest--a sort of competitive dramatic improv dance--by sexually molesting his opponent during the performance until she can't stand it anymore, breaks character, and loses the contest.
posted by straight at 10:05 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by straight at 10:05 AM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
But I remember some of it getting into YA shelves.
Yeah - while this was many many years ago, I'm pretty sure I got the first couple Xanth books through the Scholastic Book Club at school when I was like 10 or 11. I dunno how the series is marketed now, but I think the combo of "fantasy" plus "funny/punny" plus nothing too super-explicitly violent and/or sexual (as in "breathlessly detailed descriptions of some young pixie's perky butt" doesn't quite set off the "NOT APPROPRIATE!!" alarm bells in a lot of adults the way a few paragraphs describing actual sex would) meant that the series was considered OK for teens or tweens for many years.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:06 AM on April 14, 2017
Yeah - while this was many many years ago, I'm pretty sure I got the first couple Xanth books through the Scholastic Book Club at school when I was like 10 or 11. I dunno how the series is marketed now, but I think the combo of "fantasy" plus "funny/punny" plus nothing too super-explicitly violent and/or sexual (as in "breathlessly detailed descriptions of some young pixie's perky butt" doesn't quite set off the "NOT APPROPRIATE!!" alarm bells in a lot of adults the way a few paragraphs describing actual sex would) meant that the series was considered OK for teens or tweens for many years.
posted by soundguy99 at 10:06 AM on April 14, 2017
I don't think it was harmful, I think I enjoyed it.
I don't think that I'd be able to point to a specific work that harmed me, because the effect is cumulative. It'd be like trying to determine whether a specific pebble had hurt me when I'm buried under an avalanche.
And I could certainly name a lot of works that I've enjoyed that contain disturbing themes. At this point in my life, I'm less concerned about how they might shape my views of women and sexuality; I'm more critical and self-aware, and a lot of the damage has already been done. But if I was given the power to go back and change some of the things I read as a child... I wonder how that would change me.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:07 AM on April 14, 2017 [15 favorites]
I don't think that I'd be able to point to a specific work that harmed me, because the effect is cumulative. It'd be like trying to determine whether a specific pebble had hurt me when I'm buried under an avalanche.
And I could certainly name a lot of works that I've enjoyed that contain disturbing themes. At this point in my life, I'm less concerned about how they might shape my views of women and sexuality; I'm more critical and self-aware, and a lot of the damage has already been done. But if I was given the power to go back and change some of the things I read as a child... I wonder how that would change me.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 10:07 AM on April 14, 2017 [15 favorites]
Hmm interesting. And for me I don't feel like there were negative repercussions for having taken in that media, as I say perhaps because diluted by reading other stuff.*
On the other hand, I often find myself on the opposite side of this question when it comes to film and television. I am horrified by the frequency and extremity of torture, abuse and violence in those media, and just can't shake the belief that is harming us to take it all in.
*(For me, Anthony and Rice were so perceivably pretend - they are adept at writing page turners but not at creating deep literature. If anything I feel more scarred by Lolita - Nabokov's skillful writing and use of real abuse experience to communicate allegory makes that book really complicated and yucky for me.)
posted by latkes at 10:41 AM on April 14, 2017
On the other hand, I often find myself on the opposite side of this question when it comes to film and television. I am horrified by the frequency and extremity of torture, abuse and violence in those media, and just can't shake the belief that is harming us to take it all in.
*(For me, Anthony and Rice were so perceivably pretend - they are adept at writing page turners but not at creating deep literature. If anything I feel more scarred by Lolita - Nabokov's skillful writing and use of real abuse experience to communicate allegory makes that book really complicated and yucky for me.)
posted by latkes at 10:41 AM on April 14, 2017
In terms of this adaption, it just seems like the entire universe of creative work now just exists to be turned into a brand, mined for any nostalgic emotion consumers have for the original. Source material is almost irrelevant to what it gets adapted into, as long as it provides a medium for embedded advertising and can be used to sell tie in products.
Like the revivals of shows like Full House, the X-Files, Star Trek, or MST3K.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:47 AM on April 14, 2017
Like the revivals of shows like Full House, the X-Files, Star Trek, or MST3K.
posted by ZeusHumms at 10:47 AM on April 14, 2017
On the other hand, I often find myself on the opposite side of this question when it comes to film and television. I am horrified by the frequency and extremity of torture, abuse and violence in those media, and just can't shake the belief that is harming us to take it all in.
That will probably be the thing that people will be saying "what were they thinking?" about 30-40 years from now.
posted by bongo_x at 10:58 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
That will probably be the thing that people will be saying "what were they thinking?" about 30-40 years from now.
posted by bongo_x at 10:58 AM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
I don't think that I'd be able to point to a specific work that harmed me, because the effect is cumulative. It'd be like trying to determine whether a specific pebble had hurt me when I'm buried under an avalanche.
Quoted for emphasis.
Hmm interesting. And for me I don't feel like there were negative repercussions for having taken in that media, as I say perhaps because diluted by reading other stuff.*
That may be true for you - my feelings on the topic of 'where and how did I pick up what baggage' are pretty complicated myself, and I am also unconvinced that every story I read had any specific harm - but I can guarantee that everyone here suffered indirect harm from media like this because other people soaked it up.
It's a notion that I talked about in a recent discussion of whitewashing: maybe *I* don't need a role model that looks like me, but I need white people to see people who look like me as other than villains. Plenty of women grow up on a steady diet of fucked up 'girls-as-reward/male-gaze' stories and still spend their whole lives kicking ass, but their lives are still made harder because of the men that they meet who never heard any other story.
tl;dr: stuff like this screws us all over more than one way. It's insidious.
On the other hand, I often find myself on the opposite side of this question when it comes to film and television. I am horrified by the frequency and extremity of torture, abuse and violence in those media, and just can't shake the belief that is harming us to take it all in.
Yeah. Actually, beyond that, I feel like the biggest harm of all comes from the notion that there are Good Guys and Bad Guys - just the idea that there are some people we should always give the benefit of the doubt to, and some people who want to hurt everyone for no reason at all. Simplistic moral narratives are the bane of everything, and I've been really frustrated by them since I was a teenager.
Coming back to Xanth: I really, really don't want this. I read a fair bit of those books when I was young because I read a fair bit of absolutely everything. I used to clean out whole shelves at the library and just read and read when I was a boy.
A lot of stuff that was normalized then needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history, and Xanth is high on the list. (Even stuff I genuinely liked - and I enjoy a lot about Stephen R. Donaldson - probably should end up the same way. I'm one of maybe four people I've ever met who liked the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant*, but it's true that Donaldson is terrible about women, and there are just... better choices out there to emphasize. History should march on.)
* not for the man himself, whose narrative arc necessitates that he is The Worst, but for the characters around him: the giants, the Haruchai, etc.
posted by mordax at 11:08 AM on April 14, 2017 [14 favorites]
Quoted for emphasis.
Hmm interesting. And for me I don't feel like there were negative repercussions for having taken in that media, as I say perhaps because diluted by reading other stuff.*
That may be true for you - my feelings on the topic of 'where and how did I pick up what baggage' are pretty complicated myself, and I am also unconvinced that every story I read had any specific harm - but I can guarantee that everyone here suffered indirect harm from media like this because other people soaked it up.
It's a notion that I talked about in a recent discussion of whitewashing: maybe *I* don't need a role model that looks like me, but I need white people to see people who look like me as other than villains. Plenty of women grow up on a steady diet of fucked up 'girls-as-reward/male-gaze' stories and still spend their whole lives kicking ass, but their lives are still made harder because of the men that they meet who never heard any other story.
tl;dr: stuff like this screws us all over more than one way. It's insidious.
On the other hand, I often find myself on the opposite side of this question when it comes to film and television. I am horrified by the frequency and extremity of torture, abuse and violence in those media, and just can't shake the belief that is harming us to take it all in.
Yeah. Actually, beyond that, I feel like the biggest harm of all comes from the notion that there are Good Guys and Bad Guys - just the idea that there are some people we should always give the benefit of the doubt to, and some people who want to hurt everyone for no reason at all. Simplistic moral narratives are the bane of everything, and I've been really frustrated by them since I was a teenager.
Coming back to Xanth: I really, really don't want this. I read a fair bit of those books when I was young because I read a fair bit of absolutely everything. I used to clean out whole shelves at the library and just read and read when I was a boy.
A lot of stuff that was normalized then needs to be relegated to the dustbin of history, and Xanth is high on the list. (Even stuff I genuinely liked - and I enjoy a lot about Stephen R. Donaldson - probably should end up the same way. I'm one of maybe four people I've ever met who liked the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant*, but it's true that Donaldson is terrible about women, and there are just... better choices out there to emphasize. History should march on.)
* not for the man himself, whose narrative arc necessitates that he is The Worst, but for the characters around him: the giants, the Haruchai, etc.
posted by mordax at 11:08 AM on April 14, 2017 [14 favorites]
Not Anthony in specific, because he's part of a grand old tradition going back to Shakespeare, but those ideas about sexuality, consent, heterosexism, and gender essentialism were a part of why my early relationship experiences were pretty fucked up.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:16 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 11:16 AM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
I read a LOT of sci-fi growing up, with my main consumption mid-70's - mid-80's paperbacks.
Somehow, missed this entire series, and I guess everything Piers wrote.
Thank you G-d, for even the smallest of blessings.
posted by mikelieman at 11:32 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
Somehow, missed this entire series, and I guess everything Piers wrote.
Thank you G-d, for even the smallest of blessings.
posted by mikelieman at 11:32 AM on April 14, 2017 [6 favorites]
When I was a middle schooler I picked up the Xanth series from a girl I was interested in who was obsessed with them. They seemed obsessed with the sexuality of children my age, but so was I at the time, and so it didn't seem that weird at first.
When I was in 5th and 6th grade I was sorta friends with a kid in my class who was throughly obsessed with the idea of sex, which girls in the class he would like to have sex with, etc. way more intensely than just the average eleven-year-old who has just learned what sex is. He was also a huge fan of Piers Anthony. I didn't really put any of this in perspective - I never read anything by Anthony except his (also kinda creepy) Dangerous Visions story - until much later reading about this stuff online. I certainly hope the causality was running in the superficially obvious direction and wasn't anything more than that but I don't imagine I will ever know - I've actually tried to figure out what happened to that guy but his name is pretty common.
posted by atoxyl at 12:00 PM on April 14, 2017
When I was in 5th and 6th grade I was sorta friends with a kid in my class who was throughly obsessed with the idea of sex, which girls in the class he would like to have sex with, etc. way more intensely than just the average eleven-year-old who has just learned what sex is. He was also a huge fan of Piers Anthony. I didn't really put any of this in perspective - I never read anything by Anthony except his (also kinda creepy) Dangerous Visions story - until much later reading about this stuff online. I certainly hope the causality was running in the superficially obvious direction and wasn't anything more than that but I don't imagine I will ever know - I've actually tried to figure out what happened to that guy but his name is pretty common.
posted by atoxyl at 12:00 PM on April 14, 2017
I think three things come to mind with interpreting Anthony. The first is that his fetish elements are pervasive throughout his fiction, which I think wouldn't be such a bad thing if it were shelved with more explicitly kinky works. But I remember some of it getting into YA shelves.
I think adults when I was a kid did a really poor job checking fsf books for age-inappropriate elements? The first thing that comes to mind for me was Anne McCaffrey - man I was young when I read those dragon sex scenes. I also don't think precocious exposure to adult sexuality through reading was bad overall though - I mean I came out of all of it with a very clear idea of and comfort with my own sexual preferences, and their contiguousness with pre-sexual interests and experiences, even. But shit like Piers Anthony is scary because he was aiming it at kids.
posted by atoxyl at 12:32 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I think adults when I was a kid did a really poor job checking fsf books for age-inappropriate elements? The first thing that comes to mind for me was Anne McCaffrey - man I was young when I read those dragon sex scenes. I also don't think precocious exposure to adult sexuality through reading was bad overall though - I mean I came out of all of it with a very clear idea of and comfort with my own sexual preferences, and their contiguousness with pre-sexual interests and experiences, even. But shit like Piers Anthony is scary because he was aiming it at kids.
posted by atoxyl at 12:32 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I think adults when I was a kid did a really poor job checking fsf books for age-inappropriate elements?
There is that, but I also think that subtext--particularly subtext that supported the status quo--often got pass, even though it's not too hard to figure out which directions his magical metaphors were pointing at. That kind of misogynist humor was everywhere, including Ghostbusters, the Hughes movies, and I can't enumerate how many pop songs. The censors were chasing down the explicit (especially in funk and hip hop) but peeping toms, horny lads, and ghost blowjobs could squeak through.
I remember Xanth as being pretty mild compared to Anthony's science fiction, which was much more explicit when it came to setting up the coercive sex that turned out to be "ok" in the end.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:57 PM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
There is that, but I also think that subtext--particularly subtext that supported the status quo--often got pass, even though it's not too hard to figure out which directions his magical metaphors were pointing at. That kind of misogynist humor was everywhere, including Ghostbusters, the Hughes movies, and I can't enumerate how many pop songs. The censors were chasing down the explicit (especially in funk and hip hop) but peeping toms, horny lads, and ghost blowjobs could squeak through.
I remember Xanth as being pretty mild compared to Anthony's science fiction, which was much more explicit when it came to setting up the coercive sex that turned out to be "ok" in the end.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 12:57 PM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
I enjoyed much of Anthony's work (including the Xanth series) when I was in my early teens. I was naïve and socially clueless enough to completely miss the misogyny and intimations of pedophilia, although I can remember bits and pieces which would definitely not escape my attention now.
In my early 20s I stopped reading his books because the new ones I encountered seemed increasingly bad from a storytelling perspective - massive plot holes, unbelievable characterizations, and sometimes just boring and pointless. It might have been that my tastes were maturing, but I had read a few essays by Anthony expressing scornful opinions towards the value of editors, so I had a theory that he had gotten commercially successful enough that he was able to resist the editorial input that he needed to keep his work from becoming self-indulgent crap. I suppose I could test that theory by going back and re-reading the books I enjoyed when I was younger to see if they actually were better written than his later work, but that would mean wading through a lot of problematic crap that I probably couldn't miss now and would make the whole thing a painful experience.
posted by tdismukes at 1:21 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
In my early 20s I stopped reading his books because the new ones I encountered seemed increasingly bad from a storytelling perspective - massive plot holes, unbelievable characterizations, and sometimes just boring and pointless. It might have been that my tastes were maturing, but I had read a few essays by Anthony expressing scornful opinions towards the value of editors, so I had a theory that he had gotten commercially successful enough that he was able to resist the editorial input that he needed to keep his work from becoming self-indulgent crap. I suppose I could test that theory by going back and re-reading the books I enjoyed when I was younger to see if they actually were better written than his later work, but that would mean wading through a lot of problematic crap that I probably couldn't miss now and would make the whole thing a painful experience.
posted by tdismukes at 1:21 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
he first thing that comes to mind for me was Anne McCaffrey - man I was young when I read those dragon sex scenes.
I wasn't *that* young when I read Dragonriders ( and then voraciously consumed all novels McCaffrey ), but I never got the creepy sense of WTF that I'm hearing of here. Perhaps Stephen King's "IT" might be relevant in this context of what is totes inapprop. these days?
posted by mikelieman at 1:30 PM on April 14, 2017
I wasn't *that* young when I read Dragonriders ( and then voraciously consumed all novels McCaffrey ), but I never got the creepy sense of WTF that I'm hearing of here. Perhaps Stephen King's "IT" might be relevant in this context of what is totes inapprop. these days?
posted by mikelieman at 1:30 PM on April 14, 2017
> I think adults when I was a kid did a really poor job checking fsf books for age-inappropriate elements
I'm pretty certain my son brought home Spell for Chameleon from his middle school library recently. I haven't read it, but I thought "oh, I think that's the guy with all the puns, I hear his name a lot," and that's it -- I like SF but hate puns, and somehow never read the books (I read more than my share of Heinlein and Herbert at that age). So, um, adults are still doing a really poor job, at least this adult is.
Scholastic lists the Xanth books as being for 9th - 12th grade.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:44 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I'm pretty certain my son brought home Spell for Chameleon from his middle school library recently. I haven't read it, but I thought "oh, I think that's the guy with all the puns, I hear his name a lot," and that's it -- I like SF but hate puns, and somehow never read the books (I read more than my share of Heinlein and Herbert at that age). So, um, adults are still doing a really poor job, at least this adult is.
Scholastic lists the Xanth books as being for 9th - 12th grade.
posted by The corpse in the library at 1:44 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
Scholastic lists the Xanth books as being for 9th - 12th grade.
!!!!!!!!!!
I mean, honestly, that's all I got. Exclamation points and D: D: D:
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:52 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
!!!!!!!!!!
I mean, honestly, that's all I got. Exclamation points and D: D: D:
posted by a fiendish thingy at 1:52 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Perhaps Stephen King's "IT" might be relevant in this context of what is totes inapprop. these days?
Possibly triggery spoilers for the novel, IT. It's one scene from the novel best left on the cutting-room floor.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:55 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
Possibly triggery spoilers for the novel, IT. It's one scene from the novel best left on the cutting-room floor.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 1:55 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I was another young xanth reader - one of the sticking points for dropping it for me was Man from Mundania. That book explicitly argued that if your evil parents agreed to sell you into slavery to a world-controlling evil force before your birth, it would be immoral to oppose that, and your 'honor' requires you to remain a slave and start being darth vader for the evil force.
Our hero literally is about to go along with this after interminable scenes of 'ethical' discussion, until they find a loophole in the wording of the agreement to avoid it. There's no indication in the framework of the books that actually you don't have to go along with what adults tell you is best.
I'd been thinking that was pretty awful in itself. But in conjunction with the discussion above about grooming, it's even more horrific.
posted by xiw at 1:57 PM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
Our hero literally is about to go along with this after interminable scenes of 'ethical' discussion, until they find a loophole in the wording of the agreement to avoid it. There's no indication in the framework of the books that actually you don't have to go along with what adults tell you is best.
I'd been thinking that was pretty awful in itself. But in conjunction with the discussion above about grooming, it's even more horrific.
posted by xiw at 1:57 PM on April 14, 2017 [5 favorites]
I'm pretty certain my son brought home Spell for Chameleon from his middle school library recently.... Scholastic lists the Xanth books as being for 9th - 12th grade.
The travesty of school-endorsed Piers Anthony has been noted on the green previously.
posted by jackbishop at 2:07 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
The travesty of school-endorsed Piers Anthony has been noted on the green previously.
posted by jackbishop at 2:07 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
I wasn't *that* young when I read Dragonriders ( and then voraciously consumed all novels McCaffrey ), but I never got the creepy sense of WTF that I'm hearing of here.
There's a lot of mostly-implied gay sex -- when your dragons fuck, you fuck too, and (at first) all the riders except the gold riders are men, so when browns and... greens? fuck, their riders fuck each other. Gay-ly.
There's also creepiness around consent, such as when your dragon fucks another dragon you're gonna fuck its rider more or less irrespective of how you'd feel about it under normal circumstances.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:31 PM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
There's a lot of mostly-implied gay sex -- when your dragons fuck, you fuck too, and (at first) all the riders except the gold riders are men, so when browns and... greens? fuck, their riders fuck each other. Gay-ly.
There's also creepiness around consent, such as when your dragon fucks another dragon you're gonna fuck its rider more or less irrespective of how you'd feel about it under normal circumstances.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 2:31 PM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
I wasn't *that* young when I read Dragonriders ( and then voraciously consumed all novels McCaffrey ), but I never got the creepy sense of WTF that I'm hearing of here. Perhaps Stephen King's "IT" might be relevant in this context of what is totes inapprop. these days?
This is this bit I was thinking of when I mentioned McCaffrey:
There's also creepiness around consent, such as when your dragon fucks another dragon you're gonna fuck its rider more or less irrespective of how you'd feel about it under normal circumstances.
but I wasn't meaning to imply she was as creepy as Firefly or IT, or that all the sex I encountered in fantasy books was necessarily even creepy from an adult perspective. I just mean - I got those Dragonriders books off the shelf in a fourth or fifth grade classroom. No way had an authority figure bothered to review them for content.
There is that, but I also think that subtext--particularly subtext that supported the status quo--often got pass, even though it's not too hard to figure out which directions his magical metaphors were pointing at.
I was thinking more about stuff that was unexpectedly explicit (and sometimes unexpectedly kinky), rather than stuff with casually sexist attitudes. I'm sure there was plenty of that but like you said that's not actually something I would have expected adults to screen.
posted by atoxyl at 3:07 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
This is this bit I was thinking of when I mentioned McCaffrey:
There's also creepiness around consent, such as when your dragon fucks another dragon you're gonna fuck its rider more or less irrespective of how you'd feel about it under normal circumstances.
but I wasn't meaning to imply she was as creepy as Firefly or IT, or that all the sex I encountered in fantasy books was necessarily even creepy from an adult perspective. I just mean - I got those Dragonriders books off the shelf in a fourth or fifth grade classroom. No way had an authority figure bothered to review them for content.
There is that, but I also think that subtext--particularly subtext that supported the status quo--often got pass, even though it's not too hard to figure out which directions his magical metaphors were pointing at.
I was thinking more about stuff that was unexpectedly explicit (and sometimes unexpectedly kinky), rather than stuff with casually sexist attitudes. I'm sure there was plenty of that but like you said that's not actually something I would have expected adults to screen.
posted by atoxyl at 3:07 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
I got those Dragonriders books off the shelf in a fourth or fifth grade classroom. No way had an authority figure bothered to review them for content.
Which reminds me we also had Dune - I don't think there's much sex in the first book, but it is a very confusing thing to read when you're 10.
posted by atoxyl at 3:10 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
Which reminds me we also had Dune - I don't think there's much sex in the first book, but it is a very confusing thing to read when you're 10.
posted by atoxyl at 3:10 PM on April 14, 2017 [1 favorite]
atoxyl: "I never read anything by Anthony except his (also kinda creepy) Dangerous Visions story"
It's in the sequel volume, Again, Dangerous Visions. The story is "In the Barn" and it is immensely gross.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:12 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
It's in the sequel volume, Again, Dangerous Visions. The story is "In the Barn" and it is immensely gross.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:12 PM on April 14, 2017 [3 favorites]
It's in the sequel volume, Again, Dangerous Visions. The story is "In the Barn" and it is immensely gross.
Which it's meant to be, but it's also gross on levels beyond the level on which it was meant to be gross, especially knowing more about the author and his whole deal.
posted by atoxyl at 4:24 PM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
Which it's meant to be, but it's also gross on levels beyond the level on which it was meant to be gross, especially knowing more about the author and his whole deal.
posted by atoxyl at 4:24 PM on April 14, 2017 [4 favorites]
It's in the sequel volume, Again, Dangerous Visions. The story is "In the Barn" and it is immensely gross.
Woah, Piers Anthony wrote that? That story has stuck in my mind, and not in a good way, ever since I read it in middle school. I knew he was gross, but I hadn't connected him with that particular story until now.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:25 PM on April 14, 2017
Woah, Piers Anthony wrote that? That story has stuck in my mind, and not in a good way, ever since I read it in middle school. I knew he was gross, but I hadn't connected him with that particular story until now.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:25 PM on April 14, 2017
Given that so many SFF fans are so strongly against Xanth/Anthony (due to the pedophilia and general creepiness), do you think there will be a sufficient backlash to put a damper on this deal? To relegate it to a summer burn-off or even force the producers to backtrack?
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:45 PM on April 14, 2017
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 7:45 PM on April 14, 2017
Given that so many SFF fans are so strongly against Xanth/Anthony (due to the pedophilia and general creepiness), do you think there will be a sufficient backlash to put a damper on this deal?
Not a chance. They won't be marketing it to SFF fans; they'll be marketing to college-age Game of Thrones fans who want a fantasy adventure story that's not full of gore and death, with a promise of jokes and romance that isn't tangled up with political machinations and complex family histories.
They'll tone down the underage aspects, because they want Sexy Wimmin In Sexy Clothes, and while Hollywood's done its share of sexy 13-year-olds, they'll make more money with sexy 19-year-olds. They'll play off all the overt misogyny (like Chameleon's basic identity) as jokes. They'll use a lot of puns, but nowhere near as many as canon has, mostly because they won't have time. If we're all really unlucky, they'll play it like a sword-and-sorcery version of Austin Powers.
Consider how many people here have never read the books, or had only dim memories of "I thought they were a little juvenile, and I vaguely remember some creepy parts, but mostly I remember they were fun fantasy adventures." The general public is much, much less literary than Metafilter.
And the first time there's a mainstream/hollywood-focused article that talks about the creepier aspects of Anthony's writing the reactions will be:
1) Give us a damn break, you SJW feminazis; you just want to ruin everyone's fun;
2) However bad Firefly or Bio of a Space Tyrant or If I Pay Thee Not In Gold were, those aren't the Xanth books; this is about the YA fantasy series, not his adult work;
3) Eight-paragraph rant about how Chameleon's power is a realistic presentation of how women appear to men; they are so mysterious, y'know;
4) Three-paragraph screed about how this or that book cover from the series was awesome.
5) Three-paragraph screed about how this or that book cover from the series inspires rape, causes pedophilia, and warps the minds of all children who even see it - serving to nicely distract from the actual contents of the book.
6) Insistence that there is no racism in the books because it's all goblins and ogres and nymphs and such, not humans;
7) Insistence that there are no creepy pedophilic tones in the book, because see above - the "underage" characters are mostly not human and therefore human rules don't apply. (It doesn't matter if this is true. It'll be claimed, and will work to derail the original topic.)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 8:16 PM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
Not a chance. They won't be marketing it to SFF fans; they'll be marketing to college-age Game of Thrones fans who want a fantasy adventure story that's not full of gore and death, with a promise of jokes and romance that isn't tangled up with political machinations and complex family histories.
They'll tone down the underage aspects, because they want Sexy Wimmin In Sexy Clothes, and while Hollywood's done its share of sexy 13-year-olds, they'll make more money with sexy 19-year-olds. They'll play off all the overt misogyny (like Chameleon's basic identity) as jokes. They'll use a lot of puns, but nowhere near as many as canon has, mostly because they won't have time. If we're all really unlucky, they'll play it like a sword-and-sorcery version of Austin Powers.
Consider how many people here have never read the books, or had only dim memories of "I thought they were a little juvenile, and I vaguely remember some creepy parts, but mostly I remember they were fun fantasy adventures." The general public is much, much less literary than Metafilter.
And the first time there's a mainstream/hollywood-focused article that talks about the creepier aspects of Anthony's writing the reactions will be:
1) Give us a damn break, you SJW feminazis; you just want to ruin everyone's fun;
2) However bad Firefly or Bio of a Space Tyrant or If I Pay Thee Not In Gold were, those aren't the Xanth books; this is about the YA fantasy series, not his adult work;
3) Eight-paragraph rant about how Chameleon's power is a realistic presentation of how women appear to men; they are so mysterious, y'know;
4) Three-paragraph screed about how this or that book cover from the series was awesome.
5) Three-paragraph screed about how this or that book cover from the series inspires rape, causes pedophilia, and warps the minds of all children who even see it - serving to nicely distract from the actual contents of the book.
6) Insistence that there is no racism in the books because it's all goblins and ogres and nymphs and such, not humans;
7) Insistence that there are no creepy pedophilic tones in the book, because see above - the "underage" characters are mostly not human and therefore human rules don't apply. (It doesn't matter if this is true. It'll be claimed, and will work to derail the original topic.)
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 8:16 PM on April 14, 2017 [10 favorites]
Actually, the really scary thing will be seeing how many creeps crawl out of the woodwork to complain that the movie/TV series doesn't stay true enough to the books . . . .
posted by soundguy99 at 8:50 PM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]
posted by soundguy99 at 8:50 PM on April 14, 2017 [7 favorites]
" But as a pre-teen and teen girl reading them, the method of reading that was “read the fun parts until you get to something gross, skim it to get it over with, then keep reading to follow the plot” is STILL, to this day, how I am forced to consume most media products."
Yup.
"Damn, I really liked the Xanth series, and also the Incarnations of Immortality series. I read them as a teenager, and I spent hours reading those books. Maybe it's because I was younger, but I never caught on to the themes of misogyny and pedophilia that are mentioned multiple times in the comments."
I never read Xanth, thank god, but I read Incarnations of Immortality and I thought they had a lot of interesting ideas AND they weren't creepy--TO MY RECOLLECTION--until the end when that fiftysomething judge is now suddenly allowed to get romantically involved with the teenage girl because thanks to time traveling, now she's technically barely legal! Hooray! I thought that was weird at the time but apparently was still too dumb and childish to really get how bad that was.
Given that so many SFF fans are so strongly against Xanth/Anthony (due to the pedophilia and general creepiness), do you think there will be a sufficient backlash to put a damper on this deal? To relegate it to a summer burn-off or even force the producers to backtrack?
I actually think in this day and age there might be enough objections that it would, or at least they'd be forced socially to be less rapey somehow. But we'll see.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:40 PM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
Yup.
"Damn, I really liked the Xanth series, and also the Incarnations of Immortality series. I read them as a teenager, and I spent hours reading those books. Maybe it's because I was younger, but I never caught on to the themes of misogyny and pedophilia that are mentioned multiple times in the comments."
I never read Xanth, thank god, but I read Incarnations of Immortality and I thought they had a lot of interesting ideas AND they weren't creepy--TO MY RECOLLECTION--until the end when that fiftysomething judge is now suddenly allowed to get romantically involved with the teenage girl because thanks to time traveling, now she's technically barely legal! Hooray! I thought that was weird at the time but apparently was still too dumb and childish to really get how bad that was.
Given that so many SFF fans are so strongly against Xanth/Anthony (due to the pedophilia and general creepiness), do you think there will be a sufficient backlash to put a damper on this deal? To relegate it to a summer burn-off or even force the producers to backtrack?
I actually think in this day and age there might be enough objections that it would, or at least they'd be forced socially to be less rapey somehow. But we'll see.
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:40 PM on April 14, 2017 [2 favorites]
> I'm pretty certain my son brought home Spell for Chameleon from his middle school library recently
Update: he says I was wrong, that didn't happen.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:41 AM on April 15, 2017 [3 favorites]
Update: he says I was wrong, that didn't happen.
posted by The corpse in the library at 9:41 AM on April 15, 2017 [3 favorites]
I haven't read Firefly. Is it actually worse than Bio of a Space Tyrant? Which, honestly, I'm surprised not have seen already mentioned in this thread of horribleness.
I feel like every time I see a Piers Anthony discussion, I have to look for mentions of Bio of a Space Tyrant to be re-assured that he really did write something that messed up, and it isn't just some false memory of mine. All references to it online seem to steer clear of the sexual content that sits in the back of my brain.
posted by jimw at 4:28 PM on April 15, 2017
I feel like every time I see a Piers Anthony discussion, I have to look for mentions of Bio of a Space Tyrant to be re-assured that he really did write something that messed up, and it isn't just some false memory of mine. All references to it online seem to steer clear of the sexual content that sits in the back of my brain.
posted by jimw at 4:28 PM on April 15, 2017
All this discussion of Anthony and no one has mentioned his book which is about the horrors of race-mixing. It's set in a world where race doesn't exists. In fact people use makeup in order to look as racially neutral as possible. The generic word to refer to someone is "stan" for standard. And this is causing stagnation, so they genetically engineer a pure white boy and girl, a pure Asian boy and girl and a pure black boy and girl so they can reestablish the races and get society moving again or something. And at the end of the book, these couples realize this is for the best and pair off with their respective racially pure other. I feel dirty just writing that.
One of the previous times he came up on the Blue, I mentioned that my dad sent his copy of Firefly back to Anthony with a note about how it was complete crap. Anthony wrote back to say that this was the first time someone had sent him back a book with a note.
I read all of the Incarnations of Immortality, all of Bio of a Space Tyrant (with the woman who only enjoys sex if she's being raped, the concubine who can project being any other woman by the way she moves her body and a little makeup, the fact that the main character has sex while asleep with his then 15-year old sister (he's having a wet dream, she joins in)) and far too many Xanth books when I was 10-12. I stopped after trying to start the second trilogy of Adept books which included a world in which everyone walks around completely naked unless they are nobility. Which, at first, is weird, but whatever, there are tropical societies with limited to next to no clothing because they just didn't need it. But it was completely non-sexual. Not so here. I remember stopping at the point where a woman wants to ride a guy as they ship they are taking is getting ready for takeoff. The goal is to have him orgasm at the same time as maximum thrust to somehow drive the ejaculation even deeper into her?
Anyway, while the Xanth books are not the worst of the worst (that would be almost everything else he wrote), the only way I can imagine making this any good is to remove all the plots, all the misogyny, all the rape culture, all the pedophilia and most of the points the author was trying to make. So you're left with a generic fantasy realm in the shape of Florida where everyone has a single talent and there are a ton of bad puns. I doubt they'll do such a needed overhaul on the stories. Which leads me to wish them the best and that their work almost, but not completely rivals the masterpieces of Atlas Shrugged Part I and Atlas Shrugged Part II.
posted by Hactar at 11:28 PM on April 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
One of the previous times he came up on the Blue, I mentioned that my dad sent his copy of Firefly back to Anthony with a note about how it was complete crap. Anthony wrote back to say that this was the first time someone had sent him back a book with a note.
I read all of the Incarnations of Immortality, all of Bio of a Space Tyrant (with the woman who only enjoys sex if she's being raped, the concubine who can project being any other woman by the way she moves her body and a little makeup, the fact that the main character has sex while asleep with his then 15-year old sister (he's having a wet dream, she joins in)) and far too many Xanth books when I was 10-12. I stopped after trying to start the second trilogy of Adept books which included a world in which everyone walks around completely naked unless they are nobility. Which, at first, is weird, but whatever, there are tropical societies with limited to next to no clothing because they just didn't need it. But it was completely non-sexual. Not so here. I remember stopping at the point where a woman wants to ride a guy as they ship they are taking is getting ready for takeoff. The goal is to have him orgasm at the same time as maximum thrust to somehow drive the ejaculation even deeper into her?
Anyway, while the Xanth books are not the worst of the worst (that would be almost everything else he wrote), the only way I can imagine making this any good is to remove all the plots, all the misogyny, all the rape culture, all the pedophilia and most of the points the author was trying to make. So you're left with a generic fantasy realm in the shape of Florida where everyone has a single talent and there are a ton of bad puns. I doubt they'll do such a needed overhaul on the stories. Which leads me to wish them the best and that their work almost, but not completely rivals the masterpieces of Atlas Shrugged Part I and Atlas Shrugged Part II.
posted by Hactar at 11:28 PM on April 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
All this discussion of Anthony and no one has mentioned his book which is about the horrors of race-mixing.
... wow. Missed that one. Yikes.
I never read Xanth, thank god, but I read Incarnations of Immortality and I thought they had a lot of interesting ideas AND they weren't creepy--TO MY RECOLLECTION--until the end when that fiftysomething judge is now suddenly allowed to get romantically involved with the teenage girl because thanks to time traveling, now she's technically barely legal!
I enjoyed the Incarnations books more than Xanth, but they were pretty skeevy, and were the reason I stopped reading Piers Anthony as a kid. There's a bit in one of them where a woman, (I want to say Nox?) is gender flipped because of some magic. The instant she's a man, she is overcome with lust and rapes a woman, and there's this discussion of how men are just wired that way.
The Xanth stuff went over my head at the time, (like, it was weird but I didn't understand just how wrong as a child), but when I read that, I noped right out of his work.
posted by mordax at 7:26 AM on April 16, 2017
... wow. Missed that one. Yikes.
I never read Xanth, thank god, but I read Incarnations of Immortality and I thought they had a lot of interesting ideas AND they weren't creepy--TO MY RECOLLECTION--until the end when that fiftysomething judge is now suddenly allowed to get romantically involved with the teenage girl because thanks to time traveling, now she's technically barely legal!
I enjoyed the Incarnations books more than Xanth, but they were pretty skeevy, and were the reason I stopped reading Piers Anthony as a kid. There's a bit in one of them where a woman, (I want to say Nox?) is gender flipped because of some magic. The instant she's a man, she is overcome with lust and rapes a woman, and there's this discussion of how men are just wired that way.
The Xanth stuff went over my head at the time, (like, it was weird but I didn't understand just how wrong as a child), but when I read that, I noped right out of his work.
posted by mordax at 7:26 AM on April 16, 2017
« Older FFFFOUND is LLLLOST | Do Not Try This Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Artw at 11:24 PM on April 13, 2017 [12 favorites]