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Message: <blockquote data-quote="KaCee" data-source="post: 1282796" data-attributes="member: 15859">Actually, dear, the opinions where I work have been a bit more varied than that.  The 64-year old woman who claims to have read the books many times but doesn’t remember anything about Frodo missing a finger has been passingly interested in the movie, mostly as you say, from social pressure to belong.The 30-year old environmentalist who reads all kinds of literature but has not read these books hated Fellowship and gave the comment, “I wish they’d just skip all of this crap and throw the ring in the damned volcano already.”  Her beef seemed to be much more with the length than anything else.  She hasn’t seen the second two, to my knowledge, although her partner may drag her there because he’s deeply into it, mostly as a professional in set design here in Vegas.The 40-something male in the office basically never reads fiction and has no interest in this or most other movies.  He wasn’t even aware of the name “Frodo” when I talked about it.Then there’s the 50-something male seeing the 30-something female.  He has NO interest whatsoever, but she’s really into it and we’ve had long discussions of the various nuances of the films and the books.  I won’t name their organization but let’s just say it’s a big group that does a lot of social justice/freedom of speech/etc. work, and when I told her my theory that the entire LotR thing really boils down to an anti-death-penalty message (if Gollum, the unredeemable criminal, had been put to death at any point, the entire fate of the world would have gone down the tubes), she latched onto that as a possible way to get her partner to be interested, as an anti-death-penalty activist.  No word yet if she’s worked him into it.And as for me, I am totally into these movies, loving them entirely, watching the DVDs and commentaries over and over, read the books multiple times, and actually learned to read using the Hobbit before I went to kindergarten.  But then, I’m a total geek.  A D&D playing, Python-quoting, computer-gaming, formerly tech reporting, webmastering geek.So really, as quoted here……that’s exactly it.  People come to this story as they would any other story; because they’re interested in some aspect of it.I, as both a female and a writer with a cross-genre book, am sick to death of being told whether I ought to like something or not based on my genitals.  Leave my good bits out of this!  My vagina holds no bearing on the books I choose or those I leave aside.  I mean, if I let my vagina choose my reading material, the covers would get all sticky, wouldn’t they?  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /> This whole peg-the-gender-in-the-genre madness has been very much on my mind lately.  I’ve been having a bugger of a time marketing my own novel because there’s kissing and love in it, so it gets called a “romance.”  But if you’ve ever actually read a romance novel, you’d know this book doesn’t fit that genre at all.  Romance novels are fairly formulaic (some heavily so…check out Harlequin’s submission guidelines for how strict they are)…boy meets girl, they date, they have a token fight, they make up, happy ending.  It’s a plug-and-play scenario in various settings.  And for people who like that, that’s great.  I’m happy for them.  But I HATE that predictability and sameness.  My book is NOT like that at all, but because of narrow-minded genre labels, I’m getting lumped into the “fantasy-romance” genre which puts off most fantasy readers.  Heck, I’m put off by the label!I’m so sick of this notion that men don’t like to read about love.  Hellooooo…last I checked, men like kissing and nookie too.  Not every man is a wannabe thug.  Lots of ‘em even like snuggling, believe it or not.  Look at Guy Gavriel Kay’s novels…they are fantasy with romantic elements (which is what I like to call my own book), and plenty of guys read those.This reviewer or columnist or whatever she is just doesn’t get it.  She can’t whine that this is a boys’ club movie and stereotype men at the same time: that’s hypocrisy.And there’s plenty of emotion in this book and movie.  Did she miss the whole Merry and Pippin thing?  Going from laughter to tears to frustration to anger and all around and back again a few times?  Geez, for pity’s sake, Merry crying at the end made ME cry, and I almost never cry at this stuff.  If this columnist doesn’t feel that emotion, she must have a heart of stone.  And don’t give me that Sam wasn’t full of all kinds of emotions as he fought for Frodo, carried him up the mountain, etc.If she didn’t like the movie, great.  But I’ve had it with people who apply stupid concepts like gender determinism to entertainment.  You like what you like, you don’t like what you don’t like, and the shape of the flesh between your legs doesn’t enter into it!On one other side note while I’m posting…*shrug* You can have him.  He’s okay with the dark wig and all, but I really don’t find Viggo all that hot, even though I know I’m apparently in a minority of female fans on that.  Heck, in our household, these days if we notice someone lusting after someone else, we call it being “Miranda over Viggo.”Give me Jason Carter as Marcus Cole in B5 any day…*much drooling* <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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