Anita - Setting

[dan-lian.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking a bit about LKH lately (mostly because I'm looking fora MUX or two to play in, and ran across some Anita Blake ones). I think she had a fantastic setting--it was modern without shooting into the future, it was realistic and intelligently formed, with realistic bias and prejudice. Where did that go? When did it go away?

I think LKH got to the point that she felt people knew enough about her universe, Anita's world, to not need the constant setting material, and then flung us into Anita's sex life. By doing that, I think she forgot a lot of the things she developed and where she went with it, and it's been disappointing.

What are your thoughts on it? Do you like the world, minus Anita's sex life?

Comments

[queenettefallon.livejournal.com]

It wasn't really the setting that made me love the books. To be honest, the setting itself was just icing on the cake.*

I'm actually a vampire buff and I thought Hamilton had done something almost completely original and totally interesting with them. And to a lessor extent shifters themselves, because werewolf stories tend to bug me. Why just werewolves, why not werecats, dogs, etcs? To be fair, some have tried to explain why just werewolves. But I'm just not the werewolf fan that I am of vampires.

Anne Rice had some good vampires, but the idea of a vampire as a solitary being bugged me. And to be honest, Hamilton with Anita wasn't the first to come along with the idea that vampires could hang together. But to her credit she gave it a believable structure and form. So, I'm more prone to getting into something that has a vampire structure (pack, if you will) rather than something with the vampire as a lone hunter.

Sadly, that was one of my gripes in the earlier books, I felt the shifters were taking over and I wanted to see more of the vampires.

* So, it wasn't the setting itself which drew me in and make me love. To be honest, sometimes I actually felt vampires and other things being known and legal made things (sometimes) more tedious than they needed (or should) have been. But at least that kept things real, so for the early books I was happily along for the ride.