The Cluster&#$@ of Xanth

[swan_tower]

Had you asked me a month ago, I would have described the Xanth series as somewhat puerile humorous fantasy that got kind of creepy about sexuality later on.

Now? I would describe it as somewhat puerile humorous fantasy that has had really awful attitudes about sexuality and gender baked into it from the start.

The change started with this post. If that isn’t enough, you can follow up with this tag, because she’s continued on into the later books (she’s partway through Castle Roogna now), giving me more than enough evidence to say this isn’t a fleeting problem. It’s pervasive. Xanth is horrible. In addition to the constant male gaze evaluating every female character (including human-animal hybrids) for their hotness or lack thereof, you have pretty women being stupid, ugly women being totally not worth anybody’s time, and the very few women who are both pretty and smart being untrustworthy schemers. You have women, countless women, who only exist to be used for men’s gratification. You have women’s protests against mistreatment being explicitly described as an act women practice to make themselves more attractive to men. You have marriage and raising a family being dreadful fates men are expected to run away from. You have men pretty much wanting to rape every woman they see, and being held up as wonderful paragons of morality when they refrain. You have a farce of a rape trial that is I guess supposed to be funny . . . somehow.

And that’s just Xanth. That isn’t even getting into his horror novel Firefly, which goes so far with the pedophilia that merely reading descriptions of the content (and the author’s justifications for same) has guaranteed I will never read anything written by Anthony ever again.

Sorry to rain on the parades of the people who remember the early Xanth books as being Not That Bad. They are. They really, really are. I mean, the original edition of A Spell for Chameleon contained the following passage (taken from that oh-so-funny mockery of a rape trial):

Bink felt sorry for his opposite. How could she avoid being seductive? She was a creature constructed for no other visible purpose than ra—than love.

Case closed.

Originally published at Swan Tower. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I guess to me, those count as brief moments of cleverness. But they don't add up to the books deserving much praise overall. Even when the Xanth books didn't bother me, I don't recall myself ever wanting to re-read the ones I picked up; once was plenty, and then I moved on.

(Haven't actually seen or watched The Taming of the Shrew. But it's definitely on my radar as one of the ones that's tough to stage in a non-offensive way.)

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I'd say that they are tips of fractal branches from the same core. The same flavor of cleverness/intelligence/wit shaped every scene, every chapter, every section, every book, and the whole concept of a world of puns with some fairy tale tropes, etc.

As with Discworld. A crazy large premise worked out moderately seriously, then its same craziness breaking out in clever details.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

At the same time, though, the same flavor of misogyny/sexism shapes every scene, every chapter, every section, every book -- and apparently the whole concept of that world. I can't separate the two when many of the jokes and clever ideas are predicated on the gender assumptions, and the latter are so off-putting.

If I may draw an entirely random analogy: it's like my sister's opinion of bananas. She thinks they would be the world's greatest food if only they didn't smell or taste like bananas. :-P The concept is great! Food that you just peel and eat! Not even as hard to peel as oranges! But they smell and taste like bananas, and she detests that, so there's no redeeming the actual product for her, no matter how good the design.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

I ran the Caltech SF library for five years. Things I found notable was that we seemed to have all of Anthony -- in triplicate. The donations just piled up. We'd also get David Eddings in mint condition hardcover, perhaps not long after publication though honestly I didn't track that.

And yeah, I got told about Eddings writing the same series again, and Anthony writing one good book and then a bunch of crap clones, since clearly people kept buying them anyway.

Meanwhile the authors I liked didn't get donated much, or would even vanish from the shelves...