FeminismIsFree!

I’m talking, of course, about True Blood, which premiered on HBO in early September. I am embarrassed to admit that I actually went and got HBO added to my cable package just so I could see the thing. Worse and worse, this is the first television show in about, oh, ten years that I actually made a point of trying to watch on purpose. I feel incredibly peculiar, like I’d suddenly gone out and bought a stack of bridal magazines or something. Maybe I’m mutating! and this is, like, the first sign.

As anybody who reads fantasy knows, the urban fantasy subgenre is The Big One and has been for several years now. I can stick my nose up in the air a trifle about the phenom and say that I was an urban fantasy reader loooong before it became the “it” subgenre–I was a Sonja Blue fan in the early ’90s, which most people, even those who obsessively read urban fantasy, still don’t know about, and I knew who Laurell K. Hamilton was before the first Anita Blake book was ever written. Nowadays it’s hard to find fantasy that isn’t urban fantasy, and folks that you wouldn’t ever really imagine penning a word of the stuff, such as Robin McKinley, she of the generally quite lyrical and decidedly nonsexual fantasy prose, have cranked out at least one urban fantasy novel. For anyone who doesn’t know what urban fantasy is, it’s set in modern times, usually in the city but not always, featuring most often (though not exclusively–Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files are one notable masculine exception) a strong female protagonist speaking in first person, who spends the entire book kicking ass and taking names and generally being lusted after by any number of incredibly hot dudes who are usually (but not always) supernatural in nature. Men have been pumping out this type of fantasy for themselves for decades, identical in most respects with only the genders reversed and the bulk of the protagonist’s abilities not necessarily of a magical nature as they are for the females–it’s pretty obvious from a psychological aspect why women have concentrated their own characters’ ass-kicking abilities in the paranormal rather than the sheer muscle or specialized combat training. As it turns out, which should surprise nobody but the sexist, the desire to be the toughest, coolest problem-solver on the block while being hotly desired by multiple drop-dead gorgeous members of your preferred sexual orientation is a universal human desire, not a gendered one.

So anyway, the True Blood series is based on one of my favorite urban fantasy offerings, a series of books called the Southern Vampire Mysteries by an author named Charlaine Harris. The protagonist is Sookie Stackhouse, a small-town Southern barmaid who is uncontrollably telepathic, in a world where vampires have “come out of the closet” just a few years before after a Japanese biotech company invented workable synthetic blood. As it turns out, Sookie can almost never hear vampires’ thoughts, which she finds madly attractive, half-nuts as she is from listening to the endless cacaphony of mindless noise and outright malice from her fellow humans’ brains day in and day out. It’s one of my favorite urban fantasy series for the following reasons: (1) Sookie is genuinely comfortable as a single adult woman. She’s also normal–she gets lonely and horny just like everyone else, but though she has multiple opportunities throughout the books to compromise her independence and personal preferences in exchange for having a reasonable specimen of manhood around full-time, she never does. Refreshing. and, (2) the characterization of small-town Southerners is just too hysterically accurate (do keep in mind I grew up in Hicksville Kansas). and, (3) the author is a good writer–great dialogue, flawless grammar, more than just surface characterizations of even secondary characters–in short, everything that author Laurell K. Hamilton, who is half responsible for the explosion of the subgenre in the first place, lacks. (Buffy the Vampire Slayer is, of course, responsible for the other half.)

Unfortunately, the TV series mostly sucks. Some of the dialogue was lifted straight from the book, which was pretty cool, but they took quite the ham-handed approach to Sookie’s fascination with Bill and Sam’s fascination with Sookie–in the book neither of them ever acts like love-struck teenagers and I think it removes a lot of the sexual tension to portray them that way on the screen. It’s true that Sookie in the book is virginal in body, but she’s far from virginal in mind, and the only reason she’s so in body is because it hasn’t been possible for her to have sex with anybody, tuned unstoppably into their thoughts as she would be the whole time. She certainly has no interest in going around gasping at people for flirting with each other in front of her, as she’s shown doing in the show–frankly, on the show, she’s a complete twit. By far the most interesting female character on the show is Tara, who bears practically no resemblance to the Tara of the book (thought that’s actually okay–she’s a big improvement over the Tara in the book). The most tiresome part of the TV show is its constant stream of soft-core porn–there are simply way too many scenes that are absolutely superfluous to the plot and clearly only included to titillate the watcher. It’s a sad statement about something when the only way you can think of to get and hold viewers’ attention is to constantly strip and fondle yourself and moan loudly, which is a pretty good description of the show’s many interjected sex scenes. I sadly quit watching it after episode 4 or so.

In case anybody’s interested, either in getting his or her feet wet or as an already seasoned reader, here’s a quick list of some of the notables of the urban fantasy subgenre, with of course my opinions appended. Others’ opinions are always welcome!

1. Of course, the Southern Vampire Mysteries by Charlaine Harris.

2. As mentioned before, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series, which is up to something like the 15th book at this point. The first three books were good because they were original at the time and the heroine was realistically tough and likable and the sex was titillating without being overwhelming. The second three books were okay. All books after that turned into 80% erotica and 20% Anita gaining yet another superpower that made her able to defeat whatever undeafeatable baddie was occupying the current literary space. At that point, Hamilton’s horrible grammar, punctuation and sometimes even spelling became impossible to ignore.

3. Also mentioned before, the Sonja Blue series by Nancy A. Collins. I would really, really recommend it to anyone that won’t be put off by the very hard-core sex and extreme gory violence of the books. Her main character is of a cold-blooded toughness that makes most of today’s urban fantasy heroines look like shrieky little girls, and while some of them have tried to explore what it might be like to have a “dark side,” only Sonja’s dark side is realistic.

4. The Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer is getting a lot of press. It is a YA series, not an adult series, so keep that in mind if you try it. Also, you will not be surprised, if you do try it, to find out that the author is a Mormon housewife. The series is very promoting of obsessing with a boy you want to marry to the absolute exclusion of all other life planning, marrying at age eighteen with the assumption that this is definitely how you’ll find the compatible person you’ll want to spend the rest of your life with, no question!, abstinence-til-marriage, and pro-life even if the mother is guaranteed going to die in childbirth.

5. My current favorite out there is the Kitty series by Carrie Vaughn. Kitty is a werewolf who has her own talk radio show and she refreshingly has absolutely no interest whatsoever in either falling madly in love or having sex with any vampires of any description, nor has she developed a single superpower outside of what she already possessed as a werewolf throughout the entire (currently four-book, with five and six coming out next year) series. What she does develop is independence and maturity. They are awesome.

6. Kelley Armstrong has a whole slew of books, with more to come, called the Women of the Underworld series. The books’ protagonists vary–she has three from the viewpoint of a female werewolf, two from the viewpoint of a female witch, at least one from the viewpoint of a female ghost, one from the viewpoint of a female half-demon and two from the viewpoints of two different female necromancers (death magicians). They vary in quality and originality, with the better books overwhelmingly being written early. Her recent YA book was pretty good, and she’s supposed to be putting one out soon that will feature an absolutely normal human as the main character, which will be an interesting and fresh plot shift. My favorites were the two from the perspective of the witch Paige Winterbourne, called Dime Store Magic and Industrial Magic.

7. The Undead series by Maryjanice Davidson used to be hysterical chick-lit satire from first to last. Each book just got funnier and funnier, til about two books ago, when the characters all became one-dimensional caricatures of themselves whose sole purpose was to toss off one-liners while the protagonist, Betsy, accidentally saved everyone’s lives again. The latest offering was by far the worst and the author herself has indicated that she is taking the series “in a new direction” starting with said latest offering, so I may not be continuing with it. However, I have to recommend the first four or five books.

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