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lkh_lashouts2005-01-01 06:04 pm
Bloody Bones? What Bloody Bones?
Out of curiousity, I was lurking about on LKH's official board, on the Ask Laurell section, and a hopeful fan asked whether or not there will ever be an Anita/Merry crossover. Apparently the official word is that no, not gonna happen, because a) two completely different alternate universes and b) according to Laurell the fae don't exist in Anita's world anyway.
Let me say that again: the Anitaverse officially has no fae.
Um, except NO. LKH wrote an ENTIRE BOOK with fae characters and a fae backstory and just generally lots and lots of fae-ness. And yes, it's an Anita Blake book! Available right at your local bookstore! Yet official word is that it never happened. Nope, whole months of Anita's life aren't canon, nothing to see, move along.
In other words, she just jossed Bloody Bones.
*headdesk*
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But that's just an official gloss on why she won't do a Merry/Anita crossover. The real reason? The Mary Sue factor would make it explode. Not to mention she wouldn't be able to remember which character she was writing about. Anita, or Merry? Richard, or Frost? LKH, or LKH? They're all the same, mostly.
Besides, Anita would probably start ardeuring all over the Merry Men, and Merry wouldn't take kindly to that. *L*
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Well, I believe she still writes the books all by herself, sans ghostwriter; a book a year isn't unreasonable. If she were churning out two or three like-sized books, then I'd say she's getting help. Other than that...eeeyeah.
The Mary Sue factor would make it explode.
WORD. Wordy McWord on a wordwich with a side of wordchester sauce.
They're all the same, mostly.
Ehhh...I dunno if the Frost/Richard comparison is accurate, because I actually kinda like Frost, whereas Richard I loathe to the very depths of my being, the hypocritical fuck. Although lately I've wanted to smack Frost, too.
Anita would probably start ardeuring all over the Merry Men, and Merry wouldn't take kindly to that.
Merry, no. But the Queen would sell tickets!
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I was just grasping with the Frost/Richard comparison, although I did have a great page bookmarked that made a list of convenient "comparisons" between Anita characters and Merry characters, and the creator managed to match almost every character up. (Some were more tenuous than others, but it was rather disturbing to have all the similarities so blatantly pointed out. How dumb does LKH think her readers are?)
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I think you're right. AB started to go downhill right after Obsidian Butterfly (and argueably before that, in Blue Moon), which was around the time that the Merry books were released.
This is probably for two reasons.
1. LKH created two such similar series (both with Mary Sues) that she started getting them confused and the overall quality went down.
2. Coincidentally, the heavier sexual content in AB began shortly before she started writing Merry. Now, my original theory (before Cerulean Sins was released) was that when she had an outlet for her pornish impulses, she could cut way back on the sex scenes in AB.
Oh, what fools these mortals be.
Of course she didn't cut back, and of course the porn content ballooned, because after all LKH doesn't write for character consistency, or an interesting plotline anymore...she writes Teh Pr0n because everyone knows Good Girls Don't Do That, and thus she is going to be deliberately contrary at the expense of the characters, plot, and everything else. Damn the unhappy and vocal readership...she's not writing for them, she's writing to Make A Point Or Something, and strikes a daring blow for gender equality whenever Anita/Merry spreads her legs.
*headdesk*
I did have a great page bookmarked...
Oooh, where, where?!
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She really needs to re-read her books or have a card-index with all the personal informations of her characters. She don't seems to be able to remember this all and I can understand it, because her books have many characters now. I once read on her official page, that it takes 2 weeks (or so) for her to work herself into the particular "world" and that she tries to separate both series through using different colored notepads. Maybe that's not enough anymore.
Btw, it's the same with Damians age (he "lost" several hundred years in CS) and all the contradictory informations about zombies, especially murdered zombies.
And like always, sorry for my bad english
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And not only that, you fantasized a good book! Bloody Bones is one of the better books in the series! What's left now, Narcissus In Chains? Like hell!
I agree, a Rolodex or like filing system would really help...I constantly have little cards lying about to help keep my character information straight, and I STILL have problems. And I'm not the author of two series! I mean, Post-It notes are all well and good, but it's too easy for them to get lost or mixed up. Notebooks are a more permanent and organized system.
But again, if the author doesn't care enough about her books to completely ignore an ENTIRE BOOK IN THE SERIES and claim that all of the information in it is wrong and it essentially doesn't exist.... *sigh*
And it's a linear series too, so literally months out of Anita's life are now a gaping black hole. Should we discount all of the progress and non-fae events that occured during the course of that series? Hell, she introduced Jean-Claude's sire in Bloody Bones--Serephina, who was gaining power because she fed off of faeries. This was also the book that saw Larry traumatized by rotting vampires, an event that was frequently mentioned in later books. I can't remember which book, but there's also a later mention of "one time I ran afoul of a faerie" later on.
So, yeah. You don't claim that an entire book in a linear series doesn't exist, just to neatly fit into your new series. If you find it confusing to tell apart all of the contradictory fae stuff...tough tuna.
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It's mentioned more once. So, we all can blacken this sentence, every time Anita speaks about carrying lead ammo? Nice !*takes her pencils out and starts to work*
In my humble opinion LKH has lost some interest in her own series, except for all the sex-scenes and maybe (??) the sales figures. It may sound harsh, but there are so many YAABI's in the books, that I hardly find any other explanation. She don't care about character development anymore or reasonable actions of her characters from one scene to an other. Maybe I'm just too exacting, but I seldom or never saw books with so many mistakes, which could be repaired through a better editing.
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That's possible, although she's claimed that the Anita series will be theoretically interminable (MG, thank goodness, has an 8-12 book limit). So while it's entirely possible that we could see AB #40+ (by then I expect Anita will have animated Jesus himself, and then had sex with him), I expect that LKH will have moved on to bigger and more ludicrous things long before that.
I seldom or never saw books with so many mistakes.
*snerk* You, my friend, have obviously never read independently published Xena fan fic, aka uberfic. I love Missy Good, but I could spend a whole day going through Tropical Storm with a red pen. The book's good, but oy.
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Really? And here I was thinking they were the same one... They're just so gosh darn similiar! *grumble*
What I'm having issues wrapping my brain around is why bother even making them two different AU's if they're so much the same? I mean, stop me if I'm talking crazy here, but it just seems easier than completely negating the events of an entire novel.
Plus -- again just from a personal point of view -- isn't fleshing out your world (hmm, maybe not the right choice of words for these particular worlds... *g*) usually a good thing?
I don't know. The more I learn, the more I just shake my head in profound disappointment.
-- Harps ;)
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What I don't get is saying that because MG's world doesn't exist within the context of AB's, then the fae don't exist at all. I'm sorry, but fae DO exist in AB; they're just not MG fae. She's made her bed, now she has to lie in it.
...isn't fleshing out your world...usually a good thing?
Well, to be fair, she does flesh out both worlds...she just contradicts herself with each new book, and usually has contradictory information within individual books.