/lit/ - Literature

>>20329550
The Dragonbone Chair should be S-tier, so comfy and soulful, and so much better than misanthropic grimdark trash like books by Bekker

Can we talk about Princess Miriamele? This vindictive whore caused me a genuine trauma when I read this book at like 12 or 13.

I picked them up used recently and it all came back. I think I literally stopped reading fantasy for a while after I read this.

I recognize there are extenuating circumstances to her sleeping with Aspitis. But that's only the FIRST time. What do we say about the relationship she carried on with him, literally sleeping in bed with him, and possibly most irredeemably, telling the man she allegedly loves and her future husband and high king that she enjoyed it explicitly to hurt him? This is a man who, unless I'm recalling incorrectly, was entirely and exclusively loyal to her. I even think we're supposed to dislike him for being unhappy about it when she tells him.

I recognize now that the character Simon is a different sort of character, more a classical figure of legend although he's kind of a pussy, and that Miriamele is intended to be different than that, and call into question the reader's and the genre's assumptions about the love interest princess.

Tad Williams seemed to have been doing some retarded Literary Theory 'deconstruction' of fantasy, and I guess Miriamele just needed to repeatedly open her legs to a lecherous womanizer who probably transmitted to her a variety of STIs which she then passed on to her beloved, in order to become a complete, fully-formed womyn.

The problem with that is that it's gay and makes the character completely irredeemable to any man who isn't a 'This is What Feminism Looks Like'-shirt wearing basedboy who likes to clean other men's semen out of his girlfriend's vagina. I can't even say what Miriamele does is out of character behavior for a woman irl because it certainly isn't, but in fantasy novels written by men or even by women who like the genre, women are supposed to refract positive male values through a lens of feminine grace and gentleness, not behave like actual real world women. We all get enough of that irl.

Does anyone agree with me about this?