Bitchery reader Sarah (not me, another Sarah) send me a link to a long rant from LK Hamilton’s bulletin board about why the genre gets no respect. Sarah (not me) attributes the rant to LKH’s PR person Darla, though I’m not easily able to figure out who it is specifically. I’m not logged in so I can’t view profile data, and I really don’t want to join or log in. So I’ll take her word for it.
Either way, the rant? All oooooover the place. Sarah (not me) says that she’s certainly speaking out, but she’s not sure what on exactly. Me either. However, a few parts of the many many words jump out at me:
But no one does genre bashing better than the romance genre.
Sadly, I think romance readers are its worst enemy. No other genre tags its authors with disparaging names like Mary Sue or any of its variations, flinging it about with disdain as if it was utter fact.
*chokes on coffee*
I’m not sure what to address first. As a reader of romance, am I its worst enemy for pointing out what works for me, what doesn’t, and what trends I wish would die already? I’m “bashing” the genre if I call an author to task for phoning it in and asking me to pay retail for it? Hardly! I’m the customer, and if the product isn’t up to my standards, I say so.
Here’s the thing: you don’t have to agree with me, or even listen. I’m one of two Bitches with a hot pink website, and if you don’t agree, there are at least a few other sites that might agree with your opinion. I fail to see how calling a book or a series on its flaws is bashing the genre, or specifically what damage I’m wreaking by doing so in the first place. You really think an editor says, “Well, Sarah didn’t like it so we can’t publish the sequel?” HA! As if!
After a description of what a “Mary Sue” is, the writer continues:
Mary Sue is often used against female authors who write anything with romance or sex in it. Often by those who are not happy or uncomfortable with the topic or the author. Americans are especially uncomfortable with sex. We use sex to sell everything from toothpaste to cars. But we are extremely uncomfortable with the topic to the extent most school districts won’t even teach sex education for fear it will encourage kids to experiment. Really? Then why do we discuss the dangers of drugs and alcohol? Should we worry that they will try that too? But I digress.
Oh, yes you do. I’m not sure how you got to American obsession and discomfort with sex from Mary Sue-ism and sexism against female authors, but I can only guess that the barge between those two points was named “Anita” and the accusation that’s being refuted has to do with her status as a gleaming orifice®.
No one suggests murder mystery authors secretly harbor a desire to go out and slaughter people enmasse. Do western writers all want to live out on the plains punching cattle and riding horses all day long? Do war authors all secretly harbor a fantasy of mass destruction of people and places? Would they act on them if they could? I don’t know, maybe a few do or would but I haven’t seen any of them say so. Yet, let a woman write about sex in a book and suddenly folks are positive that she is writing her sexual fantasies out on paper. I know there is the occasional author who has said it is so. But if any woman puts sex to paper a minority of readers are sure she is sharing her deepest, darkest fantasies and they want to pillory her for it.
I am officially dumbfounded. And I have to at this point surmise that the writer is indeed discussing Anita and the backlash against her gleaming orifice-ness®, so I will answer using that example.
Mystery books, westerns, and even fictional tales of war often feature sexual scenes. Sex, as part of human nature, is therefore a logical part of a human experience, and no matter the genre, good fiction is an account of a human experience. Yes, romance writers, readers, and the genre itself are held up for ridicule due to the sexual content, much of it purply purple in its purple prose, and yes, authors have marketed their books or dedicated them to their husbands and boyfriends or girlfriends with thanks for the help with “research” (My reaction: Do Not Want!) but if the problem being addressed here is the non-stop sexxoring in the Blake series, I think the point of the criticism has been missed entirely.
Sex is natural, sex is fun, but sex is Not a Plot. And in my opinion, the latter books in the Anita series are more sex than plot, and less about Anita’s evolution as they are about Anita’s orgasms. All ten of them. On one page.
Just because a female character enjoys sex doesn’t make her a bad person or is necessarily a reflection on the author.
As to whether Anita = LKH, I truly, truly do not want to go there. I rarely assume that the author = character in any book I read. But the concept of a Mary Sue is not always a clear and direct parallel, to my understanding. It’s wish-fulfillment in simple and obvious form, and in terms of fiction, it’s often elementary, self-pandering, and utterly boring. This is partly why I don’t read that series any longer.
I do, however, read a lot of romance in many, many different subgenres, and I do appreciate a female protagonist who enjoys sex. I also appreciate a well-written and evocative sex scene. Not once do I think, “Man, this author is messed up since she apparently likes what-what in the butt given how many times the hero and heroine use the back door.”
If anything is reflecting poorly on the author, it’s the continual unraveling of what used to be one of the best female protagonists I’ve ever read. I fail to see how I’m romance’s worst enemy as a reader for saying that and saying it often. I read the books up to a point and had to stop reading them for specific reasons. I’d have to say that those who dismiss the genre without ever having read it are far, far worse of an “enemy.”
The ranting argument rapidly falls apart, and really, I’m having a hard time following the rest.
So maybe everyone’s happily ever after doesn’t include belonging to a single someone for the rest of your life. Nothing wrong with that if it does or doesn’t. But if romance as a genre wants respect, then its own readers need to start by respecting themselves and others. Then books won’t have to transcend genre before they get respect and recognition. We need to accept that not everyone is us. And for those that are not us, then they too have the right to be different, to seek out different things that may not appeal to us. And that we can do that without trying to pass off caustic remarks as wit and intelligence simply because we disagree. If we want respect, we need to learn to give it.
I’m sorry, what now? I never said Anita had to be monogamous, and I never said that multiple partners was a bad thing. I said her character went from multi-faceted to, well, being a gleaming orifice®.
More importantly, there are some people who prefer a monogamous pair in their romance, and having a preference is not in and of itself disrespectful. They have a right to their preference just as I have a right to prefer certain qualities in the fiction I read.
I think what’s missing here is the definition of respect, and clearly yours differs from mine. If I give my time to read a book, and I don’t like it, it’s not respectful for me to tell everyone on the internet “This sucks. I didn’t like it.” It is, however, well within my right to say, “I really, really didn’t enjoy this, and here are 137 reasons why I didn’t like it,” thereby backing up my argument with my opinion.
Just because my opinion isn’t favorable to you doesn’t mean I’m necessarily disrespectful. And I’m well aware you probably aren’t directing this screed at me personally – though I do suspect that the target defined as “Anyone who isn’t us” is anyone who didn’t drink the Kool-Aid and who refuses to accept whatever is published in the Blake series as the Gospel of Everything That Is Right With Romance Fiction Amen.
And yes, I’m being caustic, but I’m irked at being told I’m disrespectful because I don’t like a particular set of books and detail a laundry list as to why I don’t.
Turning the argument that there are flaws in characterization and plot into an argument that those leveling the criticism have problems with sexuality, gender, or respect is a profoundly silly way to make a rebuttal.
However, the writer of this rant does raise a big issue that we deal with repeatedly here: why does romance “get no respect?” Is it because romance, as Nora Roberts once said, is the “hat trick of easy targets: the celebration of emotions, relationships, and sex?” Or is it more that the genre continues to flood with books of poor quality, and those that disagree with that claim attempt to silence those who protest with accusations of lack of respect and sexual frigidity? I think the answer might be somewhere between, or, to use the Smart Bitch Term of the Year, a conflation of the two.
Well said. As for this nice rambling poster lady wondering about other genre authors using their work as wish fulfillment, I have two words for her: Clive Cussler. The man writes himself into his books, for Chrissake!
I don’t know, but I think LKH ranting about female sexuality in romance and why that may be taboo and censured by the mainstream going hand in hand with lambasting critics of Anita pretty much negates her point, because her getting het up about this really IS just annoyance that readers and reviewers are hatin’ on her girl.
It feels like she’s jumping onto a “you’re all prudes!” crusade so she doesn’t have to defend her own decline in writing and the blatant shift from bagging vampires to BANGING them. I mean, dude, no one is complaining about the fact that there’s sex in your books, Laurell. People are complaining because it’s bad sex, it’s recycled sex, it’s the same sex we’ve been reading for ten books and it’s not just your supposed Mary Sue, Anita, it’s Merry Gentry, too.
There is no doubt that there is a stigma on female sexuality, on romance as a genre, on anything that may mean a woman is off somewhere with a battery-operated device having fun without a man. But comparing that to the backlash against LKH’s books is like apples and oranges.
I wonder what it’s going to take before the concept of the Romance reader is excised from the vestiges of the *author fan,* an enigma I’m not sure has ever really existed in persona to begin with, at least not in the way it’s nostalgically invoked.
Also, if LKH is selling at the cosmically high numbers her camp insists on, why the need for such a thinly veiled kitchen sink defense to begin with?
That fact that there’s a writer named “Maugham” in The Razor’s Edge makes me wonder… See also: Harriet Vane.
But no, this is a silly argument. I don’t believe that romance authors automatically self-identify with their characters any more than someone like Cormac McCarthy self-identifies with his (egad, at least I hope he doesn’t).
Totally agree, monimala. I used to LOVE the LKH books. Like, unplug the phone, ignore the husband love. By Burnt Offerings, I felt the books were getting old, and after Narcissus in Chains, I hated them violently. And no, it’s not because I have some sort of sexual hang-up, as LKH or her minions would obviously like to think. I wish LKH could grasp that not liking her books doesn’t automatically translate into OMG UR SO FRIGID!!!111 Her books are hardly masterpieces of erotica, and I was VERY offended by her older rant about how if you didn’t like her books, you could go find other books that didn’t “challenge” you as much. To which I say, Bitch, please. I have a Master’s in English, so I’ve read plenty of challenging books. I hate your books because they are teh suck now.
There is no doubt that there is a stigma on female sexuality, on romance as a genre, on anything that may mean a woman is off somewhere with a battery-operated device having fun without a man. But comparing that to the backlash against LKH’s books is like apples and oranges.
And maybe a wee bit belittling to the serious advocacy for and defenses of broader conceptions of female sexuality, both in Romance and society. And anyway, I thought Hamilton wasn’t even *considered* Romance to begin with. Plus some of the most vocal critiques I’ve read of her books have come from readers who are regular erotic Romance readers—you know, readers who are already on board with pushing the envelope regarding sex in the genre.
I never heard the phrase “Mary Sue” in relation to romance novels. I’ve heard it many times in relation to SF/F (usually F), though. It’s most commonly applied to fanfic (which exists in other genres, but SF/F fanfic has everything outnumbered by about a billion to one).
But non-crossover romance novels? Really? People make claims that romance novelists are writing Mary Sues? Even novelists who aren’t primarily known for writing supernatural romance?
People make claims that romance novelists are writing Mary Sues?
Generally they don’t, E! But they DO claim that LKH is writing Mary Sues, which helps strengthen the idea that she’s glomming on to an issue just to keep from taking a closer look at her own literary (snort. giggle) shortcomings.
Rachel, I echo your “Bitch, please!” Hop on Pop is more “challenging” than most of Laurell’s recent work. The “ur so meeen and u dunt unnerstan mah artz” excuse SO doesn’t fly here.
Robin, wordy mcword. It is SO belittling to the wide range of female sexuality issues out there to claim that the Anita Blake books come under fire because a woman is having sex. Please. Women have been having sex in books for years, erotica has existed for years. And, yep, LKH is usually considered horror. Rather approrpriate, though not for the reasons she thinks.
Um, wrong on all counts. Mary Sue is not a romance term and is not strictly about female characters/authors.
From Wikipedia
But I must say, LKH’s rants are good entertainment value (unlike her books). And they’re free (unlike her books).
Why is this about romance, anyway? Does LKH mistakenly believe that her novels fall into the romance category? That’s strange because they are more erotic horror.
But I so agree with the assessment that sex has replaced the plot in most books…and her lack of credible dialogue is astounding.
The last book I read, I don’t remember the title – I think I’ve blocked it from my memory, I remember thinking how does this woman who presents as so clueless about stuff in the underworld manage to survive. Reading the dialogue is like reading something between a mother and a five year old.
Oh, and there’s that pesky issue of all her characters being perfect and beautiful, and somehow managing to be armed to the teeth when they aren’t wearing any clothes. What universe is she living in?
“Mary Sue is often used against female authors who write anything with romance or sex in it. Often by those who are not happy or uncomfortable with the topic or the author. Americans are especially uncomfortable with sex.â€
It’s not like the Anita books were tame for the first 10(ish) & then “Holy jeez dirty filthy sex!!†in the last. I’ve always felt that her books weren’t for the squeamish. Hell, I remember Anita jamming her thumb into a guy’s eye because he was attempting to rape her. Dead, eviscerated bodies, thumbs in eyes & ripping hearts out of bodies, but some sex is offending our delicate sensibilities? I don’t buy it. I’ll admit, a few of the sex scenes are good, but as Sarah succinctly puts it:
Sex is Not a Plot
Interesting how this stuff always seems to crop up when LKH has a new book coming out. Just sayin’.
I think Mary Sue is more commonly associated with women because men get away with it. The protagonist of Robert Harris’s Fatherland is a classic Marty Stu: a humdrum, middle-aged schlub who somehow uncovers the story of the century, making him likely a future hero to millions, *and* gets laid by an ultra-gorgeous hip young woman 20 years his junior. Throw in an ex-wife straight from Evil Bitch Ex-Wife Central Casting and an array of unrealistic secondary characters and you have one of the worst supposedly “good” books I’ve ever had the bad luck to read.
I’ve never read an LKH book. Don’t know quite how I managed that, but there you are. I didn’t read anything particularly controversial or wrong headed in that post. As far as rants go I thought it was rather tame.
What I have noticed, as I click around the romance sites, is a huge amount of hostility to LKH, mostly from people who used to love this Anita chick, and don’t like the direction the character has gone in. And it seems that LKH has reacted to this hostility with a little hostility of her own.
I’m trying to understand the issue by wondering how I’d react if Diana Gaboldon wrote Claire out of the Outlander series, and replaced her with a young trophy wife for Jamie. Would I be furious? You betcha. Would I rant and rave about it online and at home? Probably. Would I hate Gaboldon for “what she did to my favorite character� Nope. Probably couldn’t stand to read any more of the series, but would take a look at anything else she wrote. Mostly I’d just stop reading the series at that point.
What am I getting at here†I’m not sure but I’d like ask a question. Are romance readers more emotional about their favorite characters than other genre readers? I think we are. And I get kind of uncomfortable with the pressure on romance writers to produce what the reader wants, rather than what they want to write. I think the genre would get more respect if authors weren’t so pressured to meet fans/readers expectations for their characters. I think it would result in a lot more diversity of what constitutes a romance novel.
Maybe I’m just ignorant of what LKH did that was so wrong. I prefer to think that, not having read her books, she’s free to write what she wants, and we are free to read along – or not.
I think it says something about the Anita Blake series that it is now catagorized as romance, when I originally found the books in the sci-fi/fantasy section or even the mystery section. I’m not meaning to belittle romance (hello, look where I hang out online), but for the first few books Anita didn’t even HAVE sex. There was a metric butt ton of sexual tension, and people sometimes got naked, but no actual consummation (at least for Anita). Hell, Anita’s character got all prissy and uncomfortable around all the blatant supernatural sexcapades. And now she’s so busy having sex that vampires and werewolves could be eating babies and kittens left and right and she wouldn’t even come up for air. I think gleaming orifice(tm) might be giving her too much credit; gleaming to me implies a certain shiny attractiveness that I don’t associate with Anita anymore. I think early Anita is probably revolving in the literary grave LKH left her in, wondering how she managed to get replaced by a sex starved doppleganger.
anyone else find it incredibly bizarre that a forum belonging to an author who writes sexually explicit books and in the sited rant is defending said sexual explicitness has to write the title MOBY DICK as MOBY *****? WTFBBQ?
Not only are most of the professionally published Mary Sues that I’ve read in SF/F, but I could name one in mystery, too.
And I was pretty sure that the hostility against Anita was because:
1. Sex is not a plot.
2. They started as primarily urban fantasy/horror and now apparently LKH’s PR person, at least, considers them paranormal romance/erotica, meaning that a lot of people aren’t getting what they started reading the series for. Which is probably why the Merry Gentry series doesn’t seem to get the same level of venom, in my incredibly unscientific observation: it’s been at least erotica-esque since the beginning, though it’s shelved as fantasy, so anybody who wasn’t looking for that isn’t reading them.
The first Anita book didn’t do much for me, so I didn’t read more, but I’ve been surrounded with LKH fans since high school, so I’ve been getting a lot of this second hand.
Thank you iffegenia! I was beginning to wonder if I was the only pleeb left who didn’t know what a Mary Sue was.
LKH lost me long ago when book by book Anita was so much more cooler-than-thou and frankly much less interesting. Sounds like I am not alone in that camp…
Bookworm, if you haven’t read the books, I can see why you don’t get the reason for all the hostility. But there IS a reason.
The hostility isn’t mostly from romance readers; it’s a cross-section of LKH’s former fans, many of whom started out on the fantasy/horror end of the spectrum, not romance. Her forums have always been mostly fantasy readers.
And it’s not about a character going in the wrong direction (not to me, anyway; I was never a huge Anita fan). It’s about the series going down the tubes in every possible way—quality of writing is way down; plots are nonexistent; characters have morphed beyond recognition. Maybe the Outlander comparison applies to some of the reaction you’re seeing, but to me it’s the least of it.
I agree, the “pressure on romance writers to produce what the reader wants, rather than what they want to write” is a bad bad bad thing. But that’s not the situation here. And it’s not restricted to romance either. Sf/f fandoms are infamous for that kind of author/reader relationship.
Oh, and the icing on the cake? Her rants against readers. She’s up there alongside Anne Rice for “I don’t need no stinkin’ editor, what do you mean the writing’s not good? You’re too stupid for my art!” attitude. And my problem with her rants is NOT that she’s dissed me, a reader. It’s that she NEEDS AN EDITOR. She still has some of that distinctive voice, but it’s swamped in bad writing. Somebody throw her an editor. Please, before it’s too late.
I wonder how long before this one makes it onto Fandom Wank?
I’m particularly fond of this one. But apparently there have been a few.
Count me among those who’ve never read LKH. By the time I’d heard of her, I already had people warning me how terrible the books were getting.
(Anti-spam word is “summer86”. No, it wasn’t THAT long ago, thankyou.)
There’s also a LJ community called LKH_Lashouts.
I’m still lost in Wikipedia. I wonder if this is what set off the rant. From the Mary Sue Wikipedia article:
And from the Anita Blake article:
The instant anyone quotes Wiki freakin’ Pedia they’ve run their argument and any chance of legitimacy into a ditch to die.
LKH has issues. She yells at her readers, insults them, and whines on her blog. She hints at all sorts of personal horrors like a 14 year old in need of attention but terrified of the kind she’ll get.
And her books are now showing it. BIG TIME.
The instant anyone quotes Wiki freakin’ Pedia they’ve run their argument and any chance of legitimacy into a ditch to die.
Huh?
(1) I gave a number of reasons for my opinions.
(2) Wikipedia is convenient. And as it’s editable by the public, it’s especially appropriate for a discussion on what the public thinks of something. As long as everyone’s aware of its nature, I think it’s a very handy source to cite.
I guess I’m in real trouble. A reviewer (and now fellow Samhain author) wrote that one of my books (Love’s Alchemy) should be on the shelf next to LKH’s. At the time, I thought it was a compliment. Hmnnn…
Does she really, really lash out at her readers? Why are readers writing her to bash her rather than reading National Geographic instead, or buying a frappacino with the money? I don’t get it. It would never occur to me to write an author to complain about a book. I’d just stop buying them.
I was with her for like the first paragraph, but once she did the Mary Sue bit it turned into a big WTF? Mary Sue isn’t something that has to do explicitly with the romance genre OR with oversexed females. It is more an issue of the character becoming the author’s avatar or having a character that is nauseatingly loved by all and can do no wrong.
This was really a rail against those who have issues with the total destruction of Anita’s character rather than in any way being a defense of the genre.
What is interesting in this case is how much her rebuttal reminds of Anita’s behavior. In this rant, “admin” is really attacking the people who are complaining, suggesting that there’s something wrong with them for not liking Anita (and let’s face it, this really had nothing to do with romance in general). In the same way, whenever someone doesn’t like Anita in a novel, it’s always because they are a mysoginist, or a hater of necromancers, etc. It’s never because of something Anita does, only a result of the narrow-mindedness of the other person.
Iffygenia, from the rest of Chrissy’s comment, I think she was referring to the fact that the author of the rant quoted Wikipedia. Though I agree that for popular opinion, it’s a reasonable source of quotes, and also that for a term like “Mary Sue” which isn’t exactly the kind of thing you’d look up in the OED, it’s a sensible place to look for all the details in usage.
Count me among those who have never read the Anita Blake series. I TRIED to read Mistral’s Kiss. Not really my cup of tea.
No, Ciar, I meant it as a compliment. And I don’t write for Samhain. All I meant was that Love’s Alchemy should be a mass market paperback, alongside other popular authors. It did not encompass her decline in quality, or her interesting attitude toward her readers.
from the rest of Chrissy’s comment, I think she was referring to the fact that the author of the rant quoted Wikipedia.
Thanks. I realized that after I posted. That comment coming right after mine was what confused me. Though I stand by my defense of the ‘pedia for this purpose 🙂
I TRIED to read Mistral’s Kiss.
I have a tiny lingering curiosity about the Merry Gentry books, so I skimmed that one at the library. It’s the duddiest dud of them all. There’s a hilarious sendup of it here.
On the wikipedia side note… A relatively recent analysis in Nature found that Wikipedia was about as accurate (at least for science content) as the Encyclopedia Britannica. It’s important to keep in mind that no source is infallible.
I’ll put the link, but I’m not sure if others can access it.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
So let’s see heeeere…
Hold on, I think this might be a compliment. Just reverse a few ideas here.
I have taste enough to see the latest writings of LKH (whining orifice)as unsexy freaky weak, Mary Sue crap (shining orifice).
Therefore I read Romance, because only Romance readers use the term Mary Sue in order to accurately identify the crap.
Yep, I think I can accept this.
I confess to not quite appreciating the “We get no respect” issue. (Yeah, I’ve said that here before.) I think most genre writers don’t get much respect, if we’re talking about the larger literary community. Westerns, horror, sci-fi… Aren’t we all sort of lumped in together? Granted, we add the titillation of sex to the mix, but sex is funny and/or disgusting to some people, so that’s only to be expected.
I’m not saying there’s absolutely NO sexism involved in the lack of respect, but I don’t think it’s any worse than nerdism against sci-fi/fantasy. *shrug* Aside from negotiating-our-pay issues, I’m not sure why we’re so damned concerned about non-romance-readers and their scorn. (Yeah, I’ve said that here before too.)
And I think the Mary Sue label was applied with Super Glue once she wrote in a new character who happened to look just like her new boyfriend. What did she expect?
Ciar – I’m one of those readers who did just stop buying her books. I tried the new series and it just didn’t hold my interest either. But, unless it was really offensive to me, I would never go to the trouble to write the writer to lash out at them.
I do think that I can handle character changes, even to favorite characters, but really the books just were no longer any good…even when I was somewhat intrigued in the directions her characters were moving.
I stopped buying her books as well. Basically, by the time I hit Obsidian Butterfly, I was already on my way out of the franchise. I never bought that one, just got it from the library. Eventually, it even stopped being worthwhile to check them out. I mean, geez, I can buy a doorstop at the dollar store, you know?
A decline in writing skill often happens, series lose their steam. It’s pretty much the norm. LKH is hardly the first whose work has suffered after several years on the bestseller list. Why she gets people so stirred up is because she persists in claiming it’s the reader, not the book and the author that’s at fault. There is never a “mea culpa,” not even when Anita magically gets a new boyfriend when she does and she drops Anita’s two established lovers like hot potatoes.
You’re not Shakespeare! Where’s a *little* humility? A *little* self-awareness? How can tons and tons of loyal readers who’ve left the fold ALL be wrongheaded, sexually-conservative idiots?
Dear Authors,
Communicating with your fans is usually a good thing. Keep it up (Paperback Writer and her ilk).
However, usually the most preferable thing to do for your own career and for the happiness of your readers is to shut up and write. Not write anything, but write the stories that are inside of you.
Look at the example of Hamilton: What LK Hamilton is doing is insane. She should not acknowledge these negative comments, should refrain completely from ranting. If she believes so much in her own writing, then she better continue to write and ignore the negativity towards her series.
Although there is a saying that all publicity is good publicity; as far as I’m concerned, this wasn’t. Her own reaction brought much more negative attention to her books—especially to new readers—than any critic could have given. I am personally not going to pick them up because she pays too much attention to all these comments and constructed horrible defenses of her own position.
She is getting. too. worked. up. And ignoring her actual fans in favour of refuting others’ arguments. It’s not mature. By her general defence, she seems to have insulted intelligent people.
I guess what I’m trying to figure out… Who is it that we’re craving respect from, exactly? It feels a lot like “So & so says mean things about me!”
Not once do I think, “Man, this author is messed up since she apparently likes what-what in the butt given how many times the hero and heroine use the back door.â€
Turning the argument that there are flaws in characterization and plot into an argument that those leveling the criticism have problems with sexuality, gender, or respect is a profoundly silly way to make a rebuttal.
So basically, Sarah’s saying What!? What!? to the rebuttal.
Sorry, didn’t have anything serious to add but couldn’t resist a bad pun.
So that’s “what-what in the rebutt,” right, Laura?