Unbetitelt

No one gets right how much Dick Grayson should be eating?

(Warning to everyone from here on bc I get into calories and plz don’t read on if you have issues around weight/ food thank you!)

Like I am a (female) farmer from a farmer family, which is still a way lower level of activity/calory deficit than whatever Dick is doing. I eat a shit ton of food, I`m always snacking on nuts and dried fruit and drink lemonade when I notice that I am getting weaker. During the main season the lunch my mother makes is regulary not enough, so me and my siblings supplement it with whatever food we can quickly get/eat during the remaining (half an hour) lunch break.

I agree that the horror of the storyand the beauty and seduction of the text is supposed to be a horribly funny dissonance.

But I never understood the idea of being seduced by Humbert Humbert the figure, his text, charm or whatever. He is an absolutely reprehensible character and annoyingly arrogant, stupid and just plainly a loser in every scene. I never had to remind myself of what he was doing or moralize the book (I often enjoy antagonists/villain characters in fiction no matter the horror of the acts), I just found him winy and horrible, like an accumulation of the worst traits of all annoying older and/or intellectual men who thought themselves smarter then they are I ever met.

That didn't make the book any less enjoyable and I am going to be so arrogant to claim that that is not a "wrong" way to read the book or one that goes against what Nabokov intentended when writing the book.

While reading the book I really felt like the author also hated Humbert Humbert. Even in Humbers own narrative he is just soo pathetic and horrible, every second sentence just seems to drip with disgust for the protagonist, while not actually doing so in the main text? I am still amazed how that even works?! So much in the book happens in the subtext or in secondary meanings in metaphors etc. And it is just so plainly visible and obvious at the same time! Honestly that is also what makes the book wayyy more interesting than just "He is horrible but seems nice/good and talks pretty!"

Tumblr people don't like Morrison's writing for some reason and they can sometimes seem a bit asshole-y/arrogant I guess? They also wrote some of my favourite comic story lines and made Animal Man a vegetarian and animal rights activist, are vegetarian, non-binary and have a magic-based believe system, so kinda based in my opinion. Tbf there are some not completely unfounded claims of racism/sexism in their writing, especially with Talia, which fair but at that point I might as well stop reading comics at all.

Find a Google doc version of this poem here.

For a plain text version (no footnotes), see below the cut.

Oh, I hated the book well before Marion Zimmer Bradley was revealed to be a detestable sex criminal, for reasons entirely unrelated to her real-world crimes.

However, some Mists of Avalon specific crimes include:

Writing a book that is not so much a story as a tedious polemic about how yonic egalitarian ~Celtic~ paganism was destroyed by the brutal militant power of Christianity and the penis, an idea that was both stupid and deeply academically dated by the time of Mists of Avalon's publication.

Her characterization of Guinevere, which is to this day the most misogynistic portrayal I have ever seen, including 14th century and Victorian depictions.

I use "characterization" lightly, since most of the people in this book are dull mouthpieces for ideologies, or a meager assembly of one to two personality traits, especially the men. (Morgaine is the most special princess of all, so she sometimes gets up to three personality traits!)

The male characters are paper dolls, which is an issue when you're re-telling the Arthurian saga. When you're doing a feminist retelling of the Arthurian saga it's actually an even worse issue, because:

She isn't a creative enough writer to take liberties with plot (something this book has in very short supply), so she's stuck with the framework of the legends, which usually involve women attempting to trick or compete for the male characters. Unfortunately, as perviously stated, the male characters are not good, so you're left with a bunch of women backbiting and fighting and risking it all for some interchangeable dipshit, which doesn't reflect well on them. For a book that's all about how women belong to some sacred and beautiful vagina sisterhood, the female characters in this book sure spend a lot of time hating one another for being prettier than them.

It's too long. It's two hundred and thirty six pages longer than Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall, widely praised as one of the best books of the 21st century. We simply do not require all that, Marion.

Saint Patrick catches the stray of all time here; he's ported over to England for some reason, becomes Arthur's personal confessor, and boy he just hates women! The worst, those women!

Needless changing of people's names. Lancelet? Come on.

The reduction of early Christianity (and medieval Christianity) to basically whatever your personal childhood priest/pastor said that bothered you is an absolute epidemic in genre writing, and it's all over this book. The poster child for "he would not say that" but "he" is a bunch of monks on Lindisfarne.

This isn't a cardinal sin, but if a story is all about the tides of Goddess-blessed pagan freedom and ~sexuality~, then the sex scenes should be good, right? Like, these are thematically load-bearing, they need to hit. In a turn of events that everyone saw coming if they've read this far, Mists of Avalon is a "big, meaty phallus" sort of book.