Things Done

[bunn]

Went up on Dartmoor to watch our local stage of the Tour of Britain.  It was exciting, although I have to confess my grasp of what was going on was a bit shaky.  Fortunately philmophlegm was packed with relevant knowledge.




It was absolutely heaving.   I have never seen so many cars and people (and dogs, and camper vans, tents and bicycles) scattered randomly over the moor.   This was the peloton making its way through the crowd.




Ate a huge icecream with clotted cream on top.   Was too greedy to photograph the icecream. It was a Willy's.




Retrieved curtains to replace curtains rent in twain by high-velocity dog.

Watched film : Tristran & Isolde. Amusing, though Tristran and Isolde are fundamentally just quite irritating characters and the movie fails to make them less annoying.  Mark of Cornwall and Isolde's pop-eyed Irish maid much more interesting.  Ireland is played  by Ireland, but Cornwall is played, rather unconvincingly, by the Czech Republic.   Liked the overgrown Roman ruins though.

Repaired many dog toys that had been ripped into holes, tails, ears removed etc.  Briefly, our livingroom has no fluffy stuffing decorating it.

Picked blackberries with my mother. Now need to decide what to do with blackberries.  Possibly crumble.
Seem to have accidentally agreed to become vice-chair of Oldies Club.  Drat.

Comments

it's just not historical fiction without rape, sigh

[bunn.livejournal.com]

:-/ I guess people did get raped... but historical fiction writers, why so much more often than ALL the other horrible things?

Rape happens far too often in historical fiction, and random health and safety type accidents happen far too rarely. Nobody is ever horribly injured by a falling roof-tile or a misplaced goat, and I don't think I have ever read of a fictional example of Death By Cow, which given the safety figures for people who work with cattle even nowadays, must have been a regular thing...

[king-pellinor.livejournal.com]

Well, because it's Well Known that women had a much harder time than men did back in History. So in the interests of verisimilitude, as an author you have to show Bad Things happening to women or people will think you don't know anything about History.

What Bad Things happen to women but not men? You only really have rape or domestic accidents to pick from.

Now obviously you don't want to show women doing domestic chores more than you have to, which means that in order to show how tough life was for women in History (and thereby establish your bona fides as a serious author who knowsthese things) they have to get raped a lot. QED.

[carmarthen.livejournal.com]

What king_pellinor said.

Also, rape is a quick way to add angst or motivation...somehow revenge for a terrible cow accident doesn't have the same ring to it, and cow-related trauma, no matter how sincere, tends to be played for laughs.

You see rape-as-angst a lot in fiction written by teenagers and Mercedes Lackey novels as well. It's a shortcut (IMO a cheap and problematic one).

(I'm also not a fan of the grimdark, and I think it wildly misrepresents history.)

For some authors it's probably a kink, too. From my vague recollections of reading a low of Paxson novels, I wonder. And it's easier to put rape in historical fiction and not have people complain about it being gratuitous, because Everyone Knows the past was so terrible for women.

...now I kind of want to parody grimdark historical fiction, only with farming accidents and spoiled food instead of rape and bandits.