Geek Confessional Thread 2024 [NOW 2026!]

[CleverNickName]

Being horny in tweed.

You've read my Sherlock/Dr. Who fanfic!

 

[trappedslider]

True confession time: I don’t much care for fandoms in general and am happy that folks are finding books/tv shows whatever to enjoy.

My mom once she got a kindle got back into reading and her thing was romantasy, or aliens and shifters with normal humans. This was also the woman that introduced me to Dune and other sci-fi books, along with Lord of the rings before the movies.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

The last three books do end up talking a lot about the School at Roke, but they never make it the sole focus (it's more about questioning the structure of magic in Earthsea).

I’d forgotten that. I didn’t click with the last three; they feel like inelegant retcons to the world. They are of course well-written and thoughtful, Le Guin can hardly do otherwise.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I’d forgotten that. I didn’t click with the last three; they feel like inelegant retcons to the world. They are of course well-written and thoughtful, Le Guin can hardly do otherwise.

I read them back to back after a re-read of the first three. Without a gap of years or decades between the Farthest Shore and Tehanu, it felt like a pretty natural progression to me. The Farthest Shore was already going in a different direction than the first two books and the last three are basically the ramifications of what happened in that book playing out.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

I read them back to back after a re-read of the first three. Without a gap of years or decades between the Farthest Shore and Tehanu, it felt like a pretty natural progression to me.

Might give it a shot back to back then.

The Farthest Shore was already going in a different direction than the first two books and the last three are basically the ramifications of what happened in that book playing out.

It was my least-liked of the OT, by some margin. Honestly Tombs was always my favourite, and I always wanted to see what happened to Tenar after. Marrying some dillweed on Gont wasn’t what I really had in mind. The latter books seem like an attempt to make up for that missed opportunity, but it feels inorganic.

Hot take: the events of The Farthest Shore are Earthsea’s version of the Spellplague, used to justify setting-wide changes and retcons. And I like it just as well.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It was my least-liked of the OT, by some margin. Honestly Tombs was always my favourite, and I always wanted to see what happened to Tenar after. Marrying some dillweed on Gont wasn’t what I really had in mind. The latter books seem like an attempt to make up for that missed opportunity, but it feels inorganic.

To me it felt very much like a middle aged woman writing the story of the messy ordinary (ish) life of a middle aged woman, where things don't progress in a straight line, but zigzag a bit.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

To me it felt very much like a middle aged woman writing the story of the messy ordinary (ish) life of a middle aged woman, where things don't progress in a straight line, but zigzag a bit.

Nah sorry it seemed like nonsense to me too. Lives can be messy, but personalities are personalities, and most "messy"-ness of this kind is caused the perception that society demands something, and the desire to fit in with society. I don't, for one second, believe the Tenar would have married a random completely uninteresting farmer and had multiple kids with him. Sorry. No. Especially not when she wants us to believe that Tenar is still Tenar and still has her "real" personality later on.

What it felt like to me was 20th-century projection, one of Le Guin's few failures to write the genuine character. Like, she's writing like it's 1950s to 1980s America, where a woman was raised with a very specific idea of her place in society and her duties to society, raised with the idea that she had to get married, had to have kids, had to live in domesticity, even if she went to university and was briefly allowed to learn something or the like. Tenar wasn't raised like that. She was raised in crazytown to be the priestess of a weird cult. She wasn't even exposed to ideas of domesticity and a woman's place and so on, and suddenly she wants to marry some nobody (and the book does some work to portray him as a nobody, note, I'm not just saying that for effect) and live like that until he dies? And then the moment he does she does a 180 again and she's Tenar again? It honestly felt fake as hell, like a much worse author's work.

I mean you see this all the time in mediocre character writers - Brandon Sanderson can barely go a book without doing at least once on a smaller scale! It happens at least four or five times in the first three Stormlight Archive books, where the authorial hand-of-god reaches down and re-orients a character away from what their personality, history, established driving motivations and so on would do, and towards something the author either finds interesting or that fits with their dubious morality (often the latter with Sanderson, c.f. the horrible fairy telling Kaladin he can't overthrow the frankly Nazi-adjacent system of oppression because that kind of revolutionary action is just plain wrong!).

And frankly, if Le Guin had put some effort in to really exploring the whys here, maybe it could have become more believable, but even then I'm skeptical. People who make huge life-direction-changes like that without social pressure and conditioning but also without a clear and considered rationale tend to be unstable and changeable and I don't think they'd stick around until someone died.

In a sense it makes me think of Meursault in Camus' L'Etranger which is an amazing book but it basically comes out of a wholesale misunderstanding of autism, leading Camus to create this very strange internal life and way of thinking (some of which is quite representative of autism, and some of which is kind of wild/ridiculous and seems like he was trying to guess why someone might act like that), whereas this I think is someone from the 1960s (or 1970s or 1980s, I forget when the book is from) making assumptions about the life-changes she's seeing in people around her and making her character do the same things, but not really understanding why people are actually making those life changes or what kind of person makes those life changes, what prepares them to do them.

Or I could be wrong... but I don't think I'm wholly wrong here.

 

[Pale Violet Light]

To me it felt very much like a middle aged woman writing the story of the messy ordinary (ish) life of a middle aged woman, where things don't progress in a straight line, but zigzag a bit.

If I want to see the tale of a messy ordinary middle aged life, I need merely look in the mirror. Ged gets to be an archmage before his return to earth, why must Tenar be satisfied with an ordinary life? Another miss from notorious sexist ULG.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If I want to see the tale of a messy ordinary middle aged life, I need merely look in the mirror. Ged gets to be an archmage before his return to earth, why must Tenar be satisfied with an ordinary life? Another miss from notorious sexist ULG.

I don't think it's even about getting to be something cool, it's just not plausible for that character and her personality, background and so on. Like, I could buy her playing house with a farmer for a few weeks or months or year, until she thought of something else she wanted to try, but for the rest of her life until he dies? LOL come on.

I presume you're somewhat joking re: sexist but I do think it did tie in to some unexamined sexism in making Tenar follow this weirdly modern pattern which certainly a few women in the 1960s-1980s followed (i.e. was in a cult as a teenager/early twenties, left cult, married a really boring guy lead a really boring suburban life, he died, she gets together with someone from her life before - but like, there were reasons for that, and they don't apply here, because it's not the mid-century USA, and also valium and barbiturates don't exist in this setting).

 

[Pale Violet Light]

Like, she's writing like it's 1950s to 1980s America… Tenar wasn't raised like that. She was raised in crazytown to be the priestess of a weird cult.

Poetry!

Tenar follows this weirdly modern pattern which certainly a few women in the 1960s-1980s followed (i.e. was in a cult as a teenager/early twenties, left cult

Interesting. Coming from somewhere less culty than the USA, that’s not a parallel I ever would have drawn. Is that speculation on your part?

I don't think it's even about getting to be something cool, it's just not plausible for that character and her personality, background and so on.

I agree. It didn’t feel like the same person. She’s smart and curious, and I don’t think that life would have appealed much over the long term. Still, I guess it wouldn't have been the first woman kept from something better by an unhappy marriage.

Nevertheless, I wanted her to do something interesting. It’s a fantasy novel, she’s a protagonist, she can have her bloody cake and eat it too, realism and womanly duties be damned. Kicking ass seems unlikely in a Le Guin novel, but taking names would have been nice.