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Originally Posted by Hitch
My attitude toward sex scenes is the same as my attitude toward ANY scene--if it doesn't propel the plot forward, nuke it.
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My taste is very different
One of my favourite book scenes is the epilogue in Bujold's "Shards of Honor": The story is all done, the plot is wrapped up, and the epilogue shows some completely different people who we've never met before and and will never meet again, doing something that has no impact on anything happening later in the series. Spoiler for "Shards of Honor":
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There are exceedingly few things in Charles' list that aren't doable if you do the fade-to-black thing, either.
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Oh, I agree. All of those things could be done without explicit sex, or without any sex at all. I don't think anyone here has argued that sex scenes are
necessary (KJ Charles certainly doesn't in her blog post), just that sex scenes can be written in ways that advance plot and/or illuminate characters.
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Now, her take is that "...that plot is character in action," and to some extent, I agree, but that take is also more suited to LitFic than to genre fiction.
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Huh, that's interesting. Would you be willing to say a bit more about why/how you see "plot is character in action" is more suited to LitFic than genre fiction?
Especially for romance, which is (usually) centered on interactions and relationships between people, I think it fits very well.
Fantasy and SF more often have plots that spring from events external to the characters, but even then, in good books the plot is driven by how the characters respond to the (often dramatic) events, and the plot would go in very different directions if the main characters were different.
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Nobody here will change their mind about this topic. Those of you that enjoy it, enjoy. Some of us, though...I tend to sample the first sex scene in a book and if it's as tedious or poorly-done as most, I skip it.
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I don't think anyone's expecting to change others' tastes. I still think the discussion is interesting -- both seeing how others think and taking some time to spell out my own view.
My own view of violence in films is probably pretty close to your view of sex scenes. I usually get bored from long combat scenes, and I'll look away or fast forward through if there's too much explicit violence. It definitively puts me off if I feel the violence is included for its own sake, not for plot or character. Written violence bothers me much less, although that might be because I've mostly managed to avoid books with more violence than I can stomach. I've avoided Joe Abercrombie's books after reading some reviews about the violence in them.