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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9187953" data-attributes="member: 18">I get the objection and I have similar ones to similar issues (especially to the very 2015 Tumblr notion that writers "shouldn't be allowed"* to write fantasy settings with homophobia as an issue, or racism or the like - luckily great authors like NK Jemisin have utterly ignored this idiot notion) but I feel like you're underestimating Bardugo and throwing her in with a lot of inferior writers simply because she didn't dwell on the realities of the issue in that particular society.[SPOILER]There have been real-world societies with strong - in fact stronger than Ketterdam - patrilineal inheritance which celebrated homosexual relationships and even put them above heterosexual ones to some extent - they just had the potential male inheritor have children with a woman whilst having a primary romantic relationship with a man (Athens, some subsets of Samurai culture in Japan and so on). I feel like, conversely, a lot of fantasy is unwilling to engage with historical stuff like that because it's not pretty enough for them, and it's too close to misogyny. We're primarily talking a specific single individual too - Wylan - there's no real evidence it's remotely normative (I cannot think of a single actual other Kerch who is homosexual) in the society, just that it's tolerated and non-illegal. I suspect the thinking Bardugo has is, as cruel, small-minded and unpleasant as Wylan's father is, he wouldn't give him the boot for being homosexual because that in no way prevents you from having a child (do we need to discuss the huge proportion of primarily or even virtually exclusively homosexual men, closeted and uncloseted, who have had children, historically?) and carrying on the line, but being so severely dyslexic (and they have no word for it even) that he's permanently illiterate does disqualify him from running the family business, because you'd need someone utterly permanently beyond reproach as your reader, because otherwise that person would be potentially scamming you (and people would put pressure on them to do so). And honestly - I don't think that Jesper - who I love - even is that guy. I don't think someone with a crippling gambling addiction can really, in the long-term, be trusted to manage the written side of Wylan's affairs, but that's a whole other story. I will say though that I found the "I'll just murder him" plan Jesper's father had seemed a little implausible on various levels- I feel like he'd have tried disinheritance seriously before that - a society like Kerch must have clear, legally-defined ways of disinheriting people, even if it's sending them to a monastery or something - a tried and true way in many Christian societies.[/SPOILER]If you don't mean W+J I don't know what you're referring to though!I do actually have a bugbear with Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom myself, which is all the characters are like, about 5 years too young to be believable in how they act, even in a rough 1700s-1910s-type society as they're in. They're just too wise, too calm, not hormonal enough and they understand the passage of time as 30-something or older adult does, and almost no 17-year-old does. But it's across the board and it honestly wouldn't meaningfully change anything beyond minor specifics if they were all more around 22 than 17. This is a common flaw in YA fiction and a lot of anime, so I can get over it, but it's there. I notice the portrayal of Alex Stern doesn't suffer in the same way so either it's part of the stylization of Six of Crows etc. or Bardugo has grown as a writer.* = Let's be clear, that's not overstatement or hyperbole, if anything I'm playing down the rhetoric that was downright common at the time.</blockquote>

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