I love Scott Lynch
Dec. 9th, 2012 09:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skull_bearerI never really got around to blogging about my venture through the Gentlemen Bastards series, although I did spend a lot of time thinking about the first two books, particularly the gender roles. Now, I am not saying they are perfect, there are still some unfortunate issues, the biggest being that the first book starts up with a pretty much cut and paste perfect example of Women in Refrigerators.
Now, Lynch does have the excuse of aiming for something a little different fromt he usual excretable reasons this trope is usually trotted out. The aim was not so much to 'break' the main character (those deaths come later, and are entirely male), but to serve a similar role are Ned Stark's death in Game of Thrones: to carefully set up a percieved story structure the audience will expect to be followed, and with that one death, knock it all down so the reader is left floundering and uncertain as to where the story could possibly go now.
So the result ends up being more Unfortunate Implications than anything else, it's still a shame, and I'm bringing it up because that's about the one and only time Lynch's book strays into uncomfortable territory.
It does (in the first book anyway) lack major female characters, but it does something I've not seen often in fantasy, and has minor female characters everywhere. It is as though every time a character had to be defines, Lynch flipped a coin and if it was heads, male, tails, female. Doesn't matter who; guards, alchemists, sailors, streetcleaners, prostitutes. There's women everywhere.
"Quantity has a quality all its own" said Josef Stalin.
Lynch's world is basically gender null. No one cares. And the main female character problem is pretty much solved in book two with an absolutely awesome female pirate captain who it is hard not to love like crazy.
Also. There's no rape. There are like two mentions of rape in the series so far, and both are extremely vague and not targeted only towards women. Lynch has found a wonderful way around the 'rape shows that things are gritty and REALISTIC!' trope that needed to have been aborted in the first week of pregnancy: if you asked his villains why they didn't rape anyone, they would look down their noses while sipping champagne made from the souls of frightened baby seals, while sitting on the thrones carved from the bones of tiny children and guffaw at the naivity of the fool that though that was the worst thing that could happen.
Anyway, I like the Gentlemen Bastard series. And I like Scott Lynch. If nothing else his books are trying damn hard to be inclusive and fun for everyone and for the most part they succeed. Any doubt I might have of Lynch being a pretty damn cool dude were laid to rest when this glorious smackdown of legend went viral.
Now, Lynch does have the excuse of aiming for something a little different fromt he usual excretable reasons this trope is usually trotted out. The aim was not so much to 'break' the main character (those deaths come later, and are entirely male), but to serve a similar role are Ned Stark's death in Game of Thrones: to carefully set up a percieved story structure the audience will expect to be followed, and with that one death, knock it all down so the reader is left floundering and uncertain as to where the story could possibly go now.
So the result ends up being more Unfortunate Implications than anything else, it's still a shame, and I'm bringing it up because that's about the one and only time Lynch's book strays into uncomfortable territory.
It does (in the first book anyway) lack major female characters, but it does something I've not seen often in fantasy, and has minor female characters everywhere. It is as though every time a character had to be defines, Lynch flipped a coin and if it was heads, male, tails, female. Doesn't matter who; guards, alchemists, sailors, streetcleaners, prostitutes. There's women everywhere.
"Quantity has a quality all its own" said Josef Stalin.
Lynch's world is basically gender null. No one cares. And the main female character problem is pretty much solved in book two with an absolutely awesome female pirate captain who it is hard not to love like crazy.
Also. There's no rape. There are like two mentions of rape in the series so far, and both are extremely vague and not targeted only towards women. Lynch has found a wonderful way around the 'rape shows that things are gritty and REALISTIC!' trope that needed to have been aborted in the first week of pregnancy: if you asked his villains why they didn't rape anyone, they would look down their noses while sipping champagne made from the souls of frightened baby seals, while sitting on the thrones carved from the bones of tiny children and guffaw at the naivity of the fool that though that was the worst thing that could happen.
Anyway, I like the Gentlemen Bastard series. And I like Scott Lynch. If nothing else his books are trying damn hard to be inclusive and fun for everyone and for the most part they succeed. Any doubt I might have of Lynch being a pretty damn cool dude were laid to rest when this glorious smackdown of legend went viral.