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lkh_lashoutsIs JRW following in LKH's crazy-assed footsteps?
A quick explanation of how I found lkh and the lashouts: new to the genre last fall, introduced to the Dresden Files by my step-Dad, I came across this list: amazon top picks of 2007, which, at the time, had lkh's THE HARLEQUIN ranked #1, to Kim Harrison #2 and Jim Butcher #3. I thought, "damn, she must be awesome and look at how many books are in the serious" and headed to the local library. CS was the last book I was able to stand and, afterward, said to myself, "self, there must be some chatter about this decent series becoming porn somewhere...quick! to the internetz!" Found the amazon discussion boards, *snort* at the tags, and then to here. To ask a Hamiltonesque rhetorical question, why is this important? Because I had pretty much nothing invested in this series and lkh was, to put it plainly, crazy when I met her. I wasn't there when she began her slippery slide into whackjobosity.
Now, my best friend gave me J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood serious at book 1 and I have been following along ever since. Now I am feeling she is just barely on the rails and ready to veer off into lkh's neck of the woods.
Yes, there are vast differences in editing, prose, punctuation, spelling...but did you notice those when lkh first started sliding?
Let's look at the similarities: jrw writes about vampire men with parti-colored hair and eyes, that are have been either sexually abused or damaged at some point. They just need the love of one woman (yes, at least it is different women for each man) to 'cure' them and bring them true love. Each 'hero' is getting progressively more misogynistic, yet each finds his one true love (though the amount of story time put into this and it's logic is becoming less with each book). Oh, each schlong also gets progressively bigger, including someone's (I think it is V's) being described as, and I quote, the size of a "louisville slugger." Apparently all you need is to add an "h" to a word or a name and viola! it is special and foreign. Lest we forget, there are rapes and rape-fantasy sex. The plot holes are becoming glaring and confusing, including a character who was introduced on the BDB message board and just plopped into the last book. Ghosts, wizards, fallen angels...oh my! When the original cannon is being left behind and things that happened in Lover Unbound are forgotten and re-written differently in Lover Eternal.
To the real life: she says, and advertises, these are paranormal romance. But really, they are become vampire war/urban fantasy. I honestly can not remember where I read it, maybe someone can find it, that she is 'changing direction' but still says it is romance, and I don't know if there is a "dear negative reader" out there, but that she implied that anyone who didn't like the new direction could, I really can't remember...stop reading? Rumors abound that jrw is now writing for her "cellies," (read: troo equivalent) and is surrounded by yes-men and sycophants. She said the brothers tell her what to write and that she just puts her fingers to the keyboard. She writes sit down interviews with them. She shows up, in character as a brother, to have conversations with her cellies who apparently squee over this, that they are really talking to a brother. I wish I could be more thorough and look this stuff up and give you guys links, but my girls are awake from naps and not too forgiving about Mommy computer time.
Like I said, lkh was batshit when I got here. I wonder when she started if it was like this. Does anyone else see this? Am I reading too much into it?
*discuss*
A quick explanation of how I found lkh and the lashouts: new to the genre last fall, introduced to the Dresden Files by my step-Dad, I came across this list: amazon top picks of 2007, which, at the time, had lkh's THE HARLEQUIN ranked #1, to Kim Harrison #2 and Jim Butcher #3. I thought, "damn, she must be awesome and look at how many books are in the serious" and headed to the local library. CS was the last book I was able to stand and, afterward, said to myself, "self, there must be some chatter about this decent series becoming porn somewhere...quick! to the internetz!" Found the amazon discussion boards, *snort* at the tags, and then to here. To ask a Hamiltonesque rhetorical question, why is this important? Because I had pretty much nothing invested in this series and lkh was, to put it plainly, crazy when I met her. I wasn't there when she began her slippery slide into whackjobosity.
Now, my best friend gave me J.R. Ward's Black Dagger Brotherhood serious at book 1 and I have been following along ever since. Now I am feeling she is just barely on the rails and ready to veer off into lkh's neck of the woods.
Yes, there are vast differences in editing, prose, punctuation, spelling...but did you notice those when lkh first started sliding?
Let's look at the similarities: jrw writes about vampire men with parti-colored hair and eyes, that are have been either sexually abused or damaged at some point. They just need the love of one woman (yes, at least it is different women for each man) to 'cure' them and bring them true love. Each 'hero' is getting progressively more misogynistic, yet each finds his one true love (though the amount of story time put into this and it's logic is becoming less with each book). Oh, each schlong also gets progressively bigger, including someone's (I think it is V's) being described as, and I quote, the size of a "louisville slugger." Apparently all you need is to add an "h" to a word or a name and viola! it is special and foreign. Lest we forget, there are rapes and rape-fantasy sex. The plot holes are becoming glaring and confusing, including a character who was introduced on the BDB message board and just plopped into the last book. Ghosts, wizards, fallen angels...oh my! When the original cannon is being left behind and things that happened in Lover Unbound are forgotten and re-written differently in Lover Eternal.
To the real life: she says, and advertises, these are paranormal romance. But really, they are become vampire war/urban fantasy. I honestly can not remember where I read it, maybe someone can find it, that she is 'changing direction' but still says it is romance, and I don't know if there is a "dear negative reader" out there, but that she implied that anyone who didn't like the new direction could, I really can't remember...stop reading? Rumors abound that jrw is now writing for her "cellies," (read: troo equivalent) and is surrounded by yes-men and sycophants. She said the brothers tell her what to write and that she just puts her fingers to the keyboard. She writes sit down interviews with them. She shows up, in character as a brother, to have conversations with her cellies who apparently squee over this, that they are really talking to a brother. I wish I could be more thorough and look this stuff up and give you guys links, but my girls are awake from naps and not too forgiving about Mommy computer time.
Like I said, lkh was batshit when I got here. I wonder when she started if it was like this. Does anyone else see this? Am I reading too much into it?
*discuss*
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no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 01:04 am (UTC)There must be a better way of phrasing that.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 03:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 03:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 07:09 am (UTC)And I love your Tautou avvie.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 12:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 05:32 pm (UTC)Yeah, but there isn't any pronz in it anymore! :) I used to laugh at the reviews that said, "I skip/skim over all the plot to get to the 'romance'" 'cause I wanted to say, "why bother with this, just read porn...uh, I mean...erotica!" But if you buy a book that is a "paranormal romance," you should get some romance out of it.
"She doesn't pretend it's anything else."
I think that is starting to change. Since the shift to more inconsistent plot/plot-hole riddled urban fantasy (that she still insists is romance), it seems as though she is taking herself more seriously. It seems she is at the fork in the road, the same one where lkh decided to go all "dear negative reader," and I am curious to see which path JRW takes.
I could be totally off base, but I wanted it out there so that when, a few years from now, someone starts jrw_lashouts, I can say, "I told you so!" ;)
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 01:39 am (UTC)Anyway, I agree with Flo. She had to know she was writing trashy junk food fiction crack when she made her characters wanna-be rap star gangstah thugz who are are also flamingly slashy vampires. Her characters always make me think of this video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-xEzGIuY7kw
Now the fans are a different story. Everyone of 'em that screams that Ward is ruining some romantic epic that rivals Gone with the Wind or trying to be edgy by suddenly and out of the blue making the Brothers various degrees of bi-curious when Ward has been dropping clues with the subtlety of a sledgehammer that they all like a little man love from way early one... them I just want to roll up in an oil soaked rug and light a match.
BDB conceptually has way more in common with Sherrilyn Kenyon who also writes about big donged vampire hunter warriors than you-know-who. While Ward has than GQ Man rapper thing going on, Kenyon favored oddles of black emo leather get-ups with buckles and belts in improbable places.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 10:10 pm (UTC)Agreed. I actually only made it through the first book. Tried to reread it recently because I didn't think it could have been as bad as I remembered it being and I didn't get past chapter 1.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:36 am (UTC)I like JR Ward's latest couple of books. I find myself enjoying the vampire/lesser war. What I wish is that she stop pretending to herself (and us) that she's writing a "romance."
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 11:13 am (UTC)That said, Ward seems to have a much better grip on reality than LKH, and I suspect she knows exactly how to work her troos into a vicious frenzy, then sit back and watch the books climb the bestseller lists.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 02:36 pm (UTC)I actually don't mind the plot so much, and I definitely don't mind the HoYay, but I was sorely disappointed with the lack of romance in the last novel (Phury's my fav, and he got screwed out of plot in his own book). I think much of the furor over the last book, "Lover Enshrined", was the bait and switch Ward pulled (yeah, it wasn't exactly a surprise if you'd been paying any attention at all to the previous books in the series, but still).
My other issue with Ward's plotting is that it's all over the place. I think she still could have fit in a good romance story for Phury along with the multitude of other storylines she had going, but her pacing was terrible. She gave *certain* characters way too much face time (IMHO; it seems that a lot of readers liked the John Matthew-Qhuinn-Blaylock plot). She devoted whole chapters to slice of life moments for the junior brothers, but would give a sentence or a stringy paragraph for pivotal moments in the main character's development. So, yeah. Disappointing.
She's still 1000 times better than LKH. And, sucker that I am, I'm still going to get Rhevenge's novel.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 05:21 pm (UTC)Yeah, that is one of the similarities I saw, that she started out in one direction then headed in another. Which, in and of itself, is fine. It's her story, she can do whatever she wants with it. Like lkh, however, she is still stomping her feet and advertising it as it was before. Calling LEn "Phury's Story" or "romance" is a massive joke. At my local library THE HARLEQUIN has a "mystery" label on the spine! MYSTERY! Because that is what the cover and back blurb indicate. I guess the only mystery is why people still read her crap.
"My other issue with Ward's plotting is that it's all over the place."
I have this issue, too. I admit I am more into the vampire/lesser war Omega/SV plot than a lot of romance readers I know, but the continuity, pacing, and story were still all off. Phury and Corima's story was just so back-burner while the 'nuBrothers' got so much time to do nothing. I have seen the rumor that some of it was fanfic written by some of her high-ranking cellies and, while I don't put much faith in that, it certainly would explain a lot.
I am hoping LUn and LEn were just blips, but I am afraid they aren't. I guess that is why I posted in the first place.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 07:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 09:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-30 11:38 pm (UTC)That said, this series is my new crhack. Here's hoping it doesn't become the "bad crack" of LKH.