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Originally Posted by Luffy
Hmmm, it always seems wistful to me that someone likes both YA and urban fantasy.
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Originally Posted by Yapyap
I'm not sure what you mean by "wistful" in this context?
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Originally Posted by Luffy
You got me there, I had typed an aggressive word but replaced it with 'wistful'  . I don't want to get banned, not now not ever. |
I'm still lost on what you're trying to say, "aggressive word" or not. You seem to be judging people who happen to enjoy two specific genres - YA and UF - without actually spelling that judgment out in a coherent way. I get not wanting to be banned, but at least express yourself clearly. Don't substitute a word that makes no sense in that context; "wistful" is no more meaningful than "orange" in your statement. Nothing says you have to be
abrasive, but you should at least be
clear.
For the record, I read quite a bit of YA and UF - and YA UF, for that matter, like the "Paranormal Public" series. But then, I also read SF, horror, comic fantasy, superhero fiction, UF-powered mysteries, political commentary...whatever looks good, really.
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Originally Posted by Luffy
The thing with UF is that once some formerly evil beings have been humanized, true evil's definition is arbitrary and unconvincing. That is, for me, a deterrence.
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I certainly can't argue that the humanization of monsters has been going on since at least 1975, when Fred Saberhagen published
The Dracula Tape - a retelling of Stoker's novel from Dracula's point of view, painting the humans as boorish busybodies and bad guys. (Other people will hearken back to Anne Rice, but
Interview with the Vampire came out the following year, in 1976.) Arguably, you can even go back to Robert Louis Stevenson's depiction of Jekyll and Hyde, where a sympathetic character has an evil persona that can't be dispatched without killing his innocent side...which, if you think about it, is also a key part of the werewolf legend.
More recently, zombies have been getting the same kind of "makeover" that vampires got forty years ago, transforming from repulsive corpses who feed on living humans to decent folks who happen to have acquired a severe dietary restriction upon dying and have to take special care with their grooming.
Ultimately, to me at least, it's all fiction, and one take is as valid as any other.
Fright Night and
'Salem's Lot can have their evil vampires, Dakota Cassidy can have her lovably snarky ones, and I can enjoy both kinds, because supernatural monsters aren't real.
The Walking Dead has its mindless shamblers, Mark Henry's Amanda Feral is a literal maneating "glam zombie" who's more self-absorbed than evil, and Kevin J. Anderson's Dan Shamble is a P.I. who won't let a little thing like death prevent him from solving his cases. If I want to think about true evil, I'll turn on the news and see what ISIS is up to or what's happening in Ferguson, MO; witches and werewolves and ghosts and ghouls don't even make the list.
But then, as mentioned earlier, no genre's for everyone. I can't stand historical romance, for instance, and I'm not particularly keen on traditional Epic Fantasy. That's why there's a variety out there.