Reviews tagging 'Sexism'

Sir Hereward and Mister Fitz: Stories of the Witch Knight and the Puppet Sorcerer by Garth Nix

1 review

wandering_not_lost's review against another edition

adventurous fast-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No

1.5

The steampunky setting with extraplanar beings and godlets was interesting and inventive.  Mister Fitz was way more interesting than Hereward, which I don't imagine the author meant to happen.  The low rating, though, is because once the background exposition was done with, the plotlines were predictable and boring in a very specific, consistent way that felt pretty sexist.  

Don't get me wrong:  the stories obviously were supposed to be fantasy homages to the sort of swashbuckling tales where the hero slayed the monster and got the girl (who of course was ready to jump his bones after three seconds in his presence).  Such pulpy fun is necessarily predictable, and I can certainly enjoy that.  But the characterization was so thin that it just felt like the author was ticking off plot points on a checklist, with different characters slotted in each time. 

And it didn't take long until it felt like "have a woman be a villain that they have to kill, maybe after Hereward eyes her up or has sex with her" took up a depressing number of ticky boxes.  The one or two times the female character doesn't end up evil and/or dead, she just plays a sex object, which I'm not sure is better.  Taken as a whole, though, this collection has a very strong undercurrent of mostly unsympathetic women who either end up dead or in Hereward's bed. 

  Just...ew.  This just kept happening over and over and over - I noticed it after the second story, and it just...kept happening, like clockwork.  It's like the author just...couldn't come up with anything better or even mildly interesting to do with women characters.

Maybe in their original individual publications, this pattern was not so obvious and could be handwaved away as "genre conventions".   But put together like this, it's REALLY OBVIOUS and frankly incredibly creepy.  Not to mention boring - the second any female character showed up, you knew exactly how things were going to go.  It was obviously a convention that the author was not interested in doing anything remotely creative with, and it ruined most of my enjoyment of the setting.

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Sexism