Quote:
Originally Posted by meeera
Seeking clarity and common ground here: what the author (plus or minus editing) wrote was "However, groundbreaking 30, 40, 50 or 100 years ago can now seem horribly out of date and shockingly offensive." That's the only time "offensive" appears in the article. Headlines are not written by the authors of the articles, and are typically designed to be as clickbaity as possible.
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I am going to assume the headline is exactly what she meant. At least, the article itself doesn't disagree. Witness:
Quote:
[...] The fact that these were all supposed to be the best of the genre, was even more shocking.
In anger, after I read the first 10 books or so, I made my version of the Bechdel test, [...]
[...]I couldn’t like a character that raped someone. I couldn’t care less if the world was destroyed. How could anyone? Is this really the best the fantasy genre has to offer?
[...]
It was the repeated emphasis of the relative powerlessness of women, their status of objects or things to be won, that almost makes me want to write off the whole genre as a lost cause.
[...] Reading one or two over a year and you might not see the problem but after about 30, you start to look at the genre in disgust.
[...]
I’ve been acutely aware of the ferocious debate in the science fiction and fantasy community about representation [...], so I should have been somewhat prepared for this relentlessly depressing string of disappointing novels. But with the dogged determination of reading through the list, it really grinds you down.
[...]
Having spent many hours reading terribly sexist fiction, swearing and coming close to throwing books across the room [...]
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The clickbaitiness of the headline is a mere lead-in to the clickbaitiness of the article itself. Not exactly an uncommon phenomenon, TBH.
