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yendi[Warning: If you are offended at the idea that LKH's recent books have shown her to be talentless hack who alternates between just phoning it in and writing Mary Sue fanfic, you should probably read another post, preferably one about fluffy bunnies, or maybe one about fluffy bunnies having kinky sex with gorillas and an albino giraffe.]
So,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
jet_li_wannabe, shadesong, and I were talking about the latest Anita Blake, Supernatural-Creature Fucker novel today. And jet_li_wannabe mentioned that he thought that there was about 100 good pages of reading in the 500 or so pages of "novel." shadesong mentioned that even as someone who enjoyed reading porn, she found that a sex scene every few pages was just a little much.
That's when it occurred to me:
Laurell is writing the horror/porn equivalent of an early Squaresoft game.
Background: D&D (and many other early RPGS) had a Wandering Monster Table. The theory was that, to avoid the games always playing the same, the DM would roll randomly to see if the adventurers encountered a wandering monster in a dungeon. I honestly can't remember if the 1st Edition Rules required constant rolling, or if it was an option (my first DM certainly used it a lot, but he was as new to DMing as I was to playing). Either way, no DM really wanted to roll a die every few seconds just to see if an orc would randomly pop up, especially if they had a really nifty trap/encounter that they wanted the adventurers to get to. So most GMs ended up using the Wandering Monster table only when it helped move the characters along, or punish them, or give them some experience (depending on the DM and the players). This made a lot more sense than simply wandering down an empty hallway and encountering twelve kobolds and a bugbear out of nowhere.
When Square (and, to be fair, many other makers of Electronic RPGs) started releasing games for the second-gen systems (the NES/Sega Master System/etc), and continuing, to an extent, even now, they incorporated the Wandering Monster Table. This meant that you could move your little party representation across a map, and, in spite of not seeing anything, and having plenty of alternate routes (say, if you're crossing the countryside), get pulled into a random monster encounter.
At first, this was a good thing. After all, characters needed experience points to boost their characters, and there needed to be a palpable sense of danger.
But the problem with a random encounter table is that it's, well, random. And in some games, you'd encounter a group of monsters, beat them, walk a step, and get drawn in to yet another battle. It could take thirty minutes to cross two inches of a television screen, the video game equivalent of the end of a football game.
And if you're actually trying to advance the plot and get to a planned encounter, there's no DM to decide, "hey, let's not bother rolling on the Wandering Monster Table," and Murphy's Law seemed to guarantee that such times were when you'd be forced to waste time against another stupid band of thieves. It's the sort of thing that has driven many a gamer nuts, and caused more than a few to swear off RPGs (although games like Diablo and others have done a nice job of randomizing without removing the ability to see monsters coming at you and avoid encounters).
Which brings me back to Anita Blake. You see, that 100 pages of plot and character development (using the terms as loosely as you'd imagine) are interrupted time and again by random sex encounters, most of which are as believable than the random sex encounters you might find in a porn move (I swear, I expect the next LKH novel to have a scene in which Anita enters a shoe store to buy new Nikes, and ends up flashing the clerk, then blowing him in the stockroom while bad '70s music plays). One can only imagine a little electronic 8-bit Anita moving along, attempting to get from, say, her house to a cab, only to feel that pull (called "The Ardeur"). The player would mutter "oh shit, not again" as the screen spins, and she's tossed into a random sex encounter with a werewolf and a goat. Upon finishing the encounter, she moves along as if nothing has happened and enters the cab. The 250 experience points gained from the encounter can be applied to increasing her "resist gag reflex" skill the next time she levels up.
Man, how come this video game license hasn't been snatched up? It's a natural.
So,
jet_li_wannabe, shadesong, and I were talking about the latest Anita Blake, Supernatural-Creature Fucker novel today. And jet_li_wannabe mentioned that he thought that there was about 100 good pages of reading in the 500 or so pages of "novel." shadesong mentioned that even as someone who enjoyed reading porn, she found that a sex scene every few pages was just a little much.That's when it occurred to me:
Laurell is writing the horror/porn equivalent of an early Squaresoft game.
Background: D&D (and many other early RPGS) had a Wandering Monster Table. The theory was that, to avoid the games always playing the same, the DM would roll randomly to see if the adventurers encountered a wandering monster in a dungeon. I honestly can't remember if the 1st Edition Rules required constant rolling, or if it was an option (my first DM certainly used it a lot, but he was as new to DMing as I was to playing). Either way, no DM really wanted to roll a die every few seconds just to see if an orc would randomly pop up, especially if they had a really nifty trap/encounter that they wanted the adventurers to get to. So most GMs ended up using the Wandering Monster table only when it helped move the characters along, or punish them, or give them some experience (depending on the DM and the players). This made a lot more sense than simply wandering down an empty hallway and encountering twelve kobolds and a bugbear out of nowhere.
When Square (and, to be fair, many other makers of Electronic RPGs) started releasing games for the second-gen systems (the NES/Sega Master System/etc), and continuing, to an extent, even now, they incorporated the Wandering Monster Table. This meant that you could move your little party representation across a map, and, in spite of not seeing anything, and having plenty of alternate routes (say, if you're crossing the countryside), get pulled into a random monster encounter.
At first, this was a good thing. After all, characters needed experience points to boost their characters, and there needed to be a palpable sense of danger.
But the problem with a random encounter table is that it's, well, random. And in some games, you'd encounter a group of monsters, beat them, walk a step, and get drawn in to yet another battle. It could take thirty minutes to cross two inches of a television screen, the video game equivalent of the end of a football game.
And if you're actually trying to advance the plot and get to a planned encounter, there's no DM to decide, "hey, let's not bother rolling on the Wandering Monster Table," and Murphy's Law seemed to guarantee that such times were when you'd be forced to waste time against another stupid band of thieves. It's the sort of thing that has driven many a gamer nuts, and caused more than a few to swear off RPGs (although games like Diablo and others have done a nice job of randomizing without removing the ability to see monsters coming at you and avoid encounters).
Which brings me back to Anita Blake. You see, that 100 pages of plot and character development (using the terms as loosely as you'd imagine) are interrupted time and again by random sex encounters, most of which are as believable than the random sex encounters you might find in a porn move (I swear, I expect the next LKH novel to have a scene in which Anita enters a shoe store to buy new Nikes, and ends up flashing the clerk, then blowing him in the stockroom while bad '70s music plays). One can only imagine a little electronic 8-bit Anita moving along, attempting to get from, say, her house to a cab, only to feel that pull (called "The Ardeur"). The player would mutter "oh shit, not again" as the screen spins, and she's tossed into a random sex encounter with a werewolf and a goat. Upon finishing the encounter, she moves along as if nothing has happened and enters the cab. The 250 experience points gained from the encounter can be applied to increasing her "resist gag reflex" skill the next time she levels up.
Man, how come this video game license hasn't been snatched up? It's a natural.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 01:30 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 04:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:04 pm (UTC)I've had friends try to get me to read the Anita Blake books (or, at least, the first 2? 3? that were supposed to be worthwhile), but I just can't. Especially when I hear things like this from all over the place. Heh.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:11 pm (UTC)Oh, man, now I'm going to be hearing FF music while reading the next LKH book. Which I should be getting (from the library!) in a few days. Scary.
I recently compared the compulsion to read LKH to herpes. It's something you don't really want, can't get rid of, and don't want other people to know you have.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-25 08:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:16 pm (UTC)Excellent.
*GAH!*
Date: 2005-01-20 09:30 pm (UTC)I'm really glad I wasn't drinking anything,or it would have been all over the screen. *snort*
Face it, sex sells, she's writing for the lowest common denominator.
In the last book, even -I- who am a rabid LKH fan, found myself skimming the text looking for story line. Sure the sex is fun, but yes, she's gone overboard.
I think Anita and Merry are channeling each other.
However as much as I agree with you, I'm still going to buy the books because they're a fun read.
~sw
Hey, what will the goat's kink be?
Re: *GAH!*
Date: 2005-01-20 10:52 pm (UTC)I even read the Merry Gentry series and I found the last Anita Blake a bit much for sex...and I read porn too... The writing quality has gone downhill the last four books.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 09:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:23 am (UTC)My take on the series is pretty much the exact same as yours.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 10:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 10:46 pm (UTC)I'm playing Temple of Elemental Evil and there are always WM when you try to rest for any length of time.
And I can't belive you guys are still slogging through LKH novels. I saved my sanity and 6 bucks years ago.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:24 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 10:52 pm (UTC)Back on the gaming side of it, Jeff Vogel, who wrote the independent shareware games Exile, Avernum and Geneforge and managed to build a successful, mortgage-paying shareware company (http://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/), has done a lot of thinking about this. The Exile series, which is sorta Ultima IV with a sense of humor, is kinda wandering-monster-heavy. When I did the Linux port, he explained this to me and cut the "frequency of annoying wandering monster encounters" constant in half before my very eyes.
I believe he cut down on the wandering monster factor in the Avernum series, which is a greatly expanded and much prettier version of the Exile series. But in his more recent game, Geneforge, he really busted out on the box on this: you don't have to walk from town to town, because walking from town to town is boring and annoying and nobody likes doing it. Instead he came up with a topological map of sorts that makes perfect intuitive sense the first time you use it to get around the game world. Rawk!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:25 am (UTC)And I adore Geneforge in particular. Really looking forward to the third one.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-20 10:59 pm (UTC)What I'd like to do is Bowdlerize them.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 12:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 07:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 08:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 10:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 03:28 pm (UTC)Roll for random sexual encounter.
*laugh*
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 04:56 pm (UTC)Thanks!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-21 09:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-23 08:17 am (UTC)By the way, do you play Kingdom of Loathing (http://www.kingdomofloathing.com/)? There's an encounter there that was written with this subject in mind...
(Unfortunately, there's no lj-cut ability to spoiler-protect comments...)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-23 08:18 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-26 08:00 pm (UTC)