Blogflog - Dead Ice: Micah

[blogfloggery.livejournal.com]

Link: Dead Ice: Micah
Disclaimer: This blog entry is verbatim, as originally posted on LKH's blog. Copyright belongs to Ma Petite Enterprises.

Mod note: Contains rape discussion.

Micah blog:

Micah Callahan came on stage mid-way through the current books, almost literally half-way at book #10 Narcissus in Chains. The book was a game changer in a lot of ways for the Anita Blake series, but one of the biggest for her personal life was the addition of Micah.



Question: Why did the sexual content go up in the series once Micah was introduced?

Answer: It didn’t really go up that much.

Secrets to Share: The Meredith Gentry series was actually created, at least in part, to give me somewhere to put all that literary sexual frustration that wasn’t happening in the Anita Blake novels. I had written and finished the first Merry book, A Kiss of Shadows, and set a much higher sexual content from the very beginning. I think that’s why no one ever complains about it, because it was the dynamic from the start, but with Anita it wasn’t. She started out a very old-fashioned good girl, in that I’m-waiting-for-my-white-dress-and-picket-fence kind of way. So, after nine books where she had managed to have sex twice, three times if you want a more open definition than just intercourse, I’d decided to stop arguing with her. If Anita wanted to keep both Jean-Claude and Richard at bay and continue to cling to her commitment phobia, then so be it, I was done. Not done with the series, but done arguing with her, with Richard, with everyone. Merry didn’t argue about sex, or even commitment, because the whole idea was for her to find a prince/king to her princess/queen. Narcissus in Chains is a solid mystery with a villain that is still one of the most original ideas I’ve ever come up with for a bad guy; but to listen to the haters you’d think there is nothing but sex in the book. In fact, there is only one full-blown sex scene in the entire book. You could make a case for two, maybe three, if intercourse, or oral isn’t your sole criteria for definition of sex. One of those scenes amounts to metaphysical foreplay scene with Richard, Jean-Claude, and Anita, but the other two scenes are with Micah, who was a brand new character introduced in this book. There is actually no more sex in this book than in Blue Moon or The Killing Dance, but what is different is who the sex is with.

I had so many people complain about the sexual content in Narcissus in Chains that I almost accepted that there must be more sex in the book than I remembered writing, but no, no, there isn’t. It has only been recently that I realized the problem was that the first metaphysical foreplay scene was with Jean-Claude and Richard, the two men that Anita had dated for most of the preceding nine books, so fans had become wedded to the idea that this was it – her two guys. They were also convinced she would pick one guy to finally settle down with, and then suddenly Micah comes out of left field and wins the day, the lady, everything, because that’s what some fans seemed to think. They would have to wait for the next novel, Cerulean Sins, to discover that Anita hadn’t dumped both the other men. She’d date and still be lovers with both Richard and Jean-Claude, but she would also continue to date Micah. It would take me almost ten years to realize why some of the anger directed at Micah existed and by then it was too late to change things, even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t. My series, my books, my characters, and they tend to date/sleep with who they want to with very little input from me, actually. Micah was supposed to be a bit player, in fact he was supposed to be a bad guy henchman for the main villain. He wasn’t supposed to date Anita, let alone have sex with her. Which leads us into the next question.

Question: Did Micah rape Anita the first time they were together?

Answer: No. Not to me, but to my great surprise this was one of the most frequent questions I’ve gotten over the years about that first scene.

Secrets to Share: This question totally caught me off guard at first, and the people who asked it in a hateful way, or were just haters in general, I pretty much ignored. If you want me to pay attention to you, be nice. Some very sincere women, who were very nice, were upset about the scene. It turned out that the scene had seemed like rape to them because Anita had not said a fully spoken, “yes.” I swear that I remembered her saying yes in the scene. I swear that I wrote her saying yes in the scene, but so many women were genuinely upset by the scene that I went back and reread it. One thing was true, Anita doesn’t say an out loud yes. *head desk* Sometimes when you write a book, things are so crystal clear in your head that you think they are on the paper; you actually begin to read them into the words, but that doesn’t mean they’re there. The problem is copyeditors and editors in New York can’t see what’s in my head, only what’s on the page, and if what I “see” in my head never got onto a version of the page, then they can’t help me remember it.

I went so far as to add a “yes” between the hardback and one of the paperback versions of Narcissus in Chains, but honestly I can’t remember which print run the change was in, and when the next print run came out the publisher had reverted to the master print file, and the “yes” was missing once more. *head wall* If I could do this scene again I would rewrite some of Anita’s interior dialogue to make it more acceptable to the women who saw/feel the scene as rape. All I can say is that I did not write the scene with that in mind, but having listened to enough polite fans explain their point of view over the years, I can see their point. My apologies to those that were genuinely upset by the scene as written, and I have endeavored not to fall into ambiguity in any other sex scene with anyone since then.

Question: Is Micah going to become king of the wereanimals in America, the way that Jean-Claude is king of the vampires?

Answer: I don’t know.

Secrets to Share: Micah is one of those characters that changed completely between character building notes and stepping on stage. The moment he interacted with Anita for “real” on paper he was someone new, someone I hadn’t planned. He was honorable, determined, as ruthlessly practical as Anita, and in many ways the near perfect helpmate that Anita had been needing. I had no idea he was a leopard king, a Nimir-raj, or that Anita would be his leopard queen, Nimir-ra. I had to come up with vocabulary for that, and so much more, after Micah announced who and what he was in the shapeshifter community. Since I didn’t know any of this when he first stepped into fictional reality I had no idea that he and Anita would create The Coalition for Better Understanding Between Lycanthrope and Human Communities, or that Micah would be called all over the country when there was a conflict between lycanthrope groups, or between humans and the shapeshifter community. Here’s a freebie insight, in Affliction I thought it was clear that Micah only interferes with out of state animal groups when those groups call the Coalition in to solve a dispute, or violence has already broken out, but not gotten to the attention of human authorities, but apparently not. Again, with Micah, people thought he was just traveling the country forcing groups to join our larger group – no. The Coalition goes only where, and if, called, but once you call in help if we pay in blood and pain from our people to solve your problem, then you and yours may end up joining the Coalition whether you like it or not.

Sneak Peek from Dead Ice:

Micah came through the door like he came through every door, as if the room were his room, or at the very least he was thinking of purchasing it. It was a surety and security in himself that he’d had since I’d met him.

Comments

[shadwing.livejournal.com]

Ah yes the classic "No...but really YES!" argument.

I truly believe she wrote that scene believing it was not rape but had no disconnect, she honestly thought she was writing a steamy hot sex scene, and it may have been that way in her head...but that is NOT what it turned out to be on the written page. Somebody caught her on it, and rather than re-write the encounter she flew off in a snit and took the book to another publisher and insisted the book be published as is, with minimum edits.

People reacted to that scene, and safe money is that the publisher asked for a re-write of the scene, and rather than make it bluntly consensual, or a the lease make it more clear that neither Anita OR Micah were in control of their actions (mated leopards and all that) to make Anita's consent clear, or Micah less of a rapist...she made it even more murky.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

My thought is that she may have thought it was a steamy hot sex scene because it was based on a scene or fantasy she'd played out - but using it to introduce a new character was a bad move because it was totally out of character for Anita, and I think many of us were waiting for her to shoot him. Instead, we got what we got...

[darkestgrace.livejournal.com]

To be honest, it's the out of character that bothers me most. Up until then, Anita had gone from 'not until marriage' to 'it's OK if I'm in a commited relationship with you'. There was nothing in her character development up until that point that would make me think she was the sort of person who would have casual sex in the shower with a stranger. So, if LKH wants me to believe that it was all totally consensual, no mystical forces compelling either of them, and Anita was totally into it, then what she's basically telling me is that she derailed Anita's entire character so that she could have sex with her husbands SI.

[lliira (from livejournal.com)]

She does say, "If Anita wanted to keep both Jean-Claude and Richard at bay and continue to cling to her commitment phobia, then so be it, I was done. Not done with the series, but done arguing with her, with Richard, with everyone."

So Anita had to be raped into complacency. LKH is not a character writer and doesn't "listen" to her characters like she claims to, considering this is what she did to her main character.

Also, calling Anita's (completely justified) wariness of JC "commitment phobia" is kind of hilarious in a sad way.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

Her wariness of JC is justified, but I could make an argument for commitment phobia based on the whole deal with the ex-fiance.

Honestly, I wish she'd thrown in the towel.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

This. Especially because it's something that could have been so easily fixed by the author taking a little time to set it up, showing her progressing from "not until marriage" to something else. Or even just thinking, "I wouldn't normally do this, but tonight I thought, yay, so very yay" (to insert another writing quirk of hers that makes me want to strangle the character) - or shown conflict or something. Even just the character thinking to herself that it's stupid to be so hung up on one incident from her past that she lets it control her relationships. People still might have thought it was too convenient, but at least it would have been addressed.

But words are her business, so what do I know?

[darkestgrace.livejournal.com]

We even had that time-skip before Narcissus in Chains, where she spent six months away from St Louis with her witch friend Marianne. It would be easy to say 'Marianne and I had done a lot of talking over the past few months. I realised that I had been giving my ex-fiance far too much power over me. I liked sex, and life was too short for me to deny myself things that I enjoyed. I was determined to own my sexuality, rather than let Jean Claude use it to control me like a blushing virgin.' Problem solved. It could come up at the start of the novel, when she's talking to Ronnie about Richard and Jean Claude. Then she and Micah can have 'you're really hot and thank God we're alive' sex in the shower. No rape needed at all, and character development rather than derailment.

But that would mean that Anita actively wanted sex, and Good Girls don't want sex.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

Sad but true assessment of her world view.