/lit/ - Literature

What happened?

Did Joe Abercrombie become a simp between this book and the last? Red Country was so great. What happened? OK, checking release dates, Red Country came out 2012, and A Little Hatred came out 2019. A lot of SJW nonsense happened in those years, and I'm afraid it has infected ol' Joe. At least, that's what I suspect. Can't say for certain, but the tone in A Little Hatred is a symptom of something.

Right, so Joe's books always had prominent female characters. And that was all well and fine. They were interesting enough characters in their own right. They had their own motives, their own flaws, their own character arcs. They contributed in their own way to the whole storym just like all the male characters contributed their own parts. They were pretty much how female characters are supposed to be written.

But A Little Hatred though. It just feels off. It feels like Joe was trying to sneak in a bunch of female empowerment bullshit. Many paragraphs were spent describing how amazing the two lead female characters are. How special they are, and how powerful they are, and how they defy gender stereotypes, and make otherwise powerful men cower to them, and how they deserve to be in power instead of the men who are always fucking things up, and how they're dominant in the bed room, and their lovers don't deserve them, and blah and blah and blah.

But not only are there two lead girls that get the empowerment treatment, there are a few supporting characters that get similar treatment. One is just this tough spy who is hyper competent and literally did everything perfectly the entire book. The second is a daughter who by the end of the book starts to take more charge of the family than her father. And the third is a brilliant military commander, who has the respect of all her men.

The two male lead characters are largely incompetent, and only serve to make the lead female characters look good. One of male leads gay, but he doesn't realize it. He suppresses his gay thoughts, but it's noted how he doesn't really get women, and is just mimicking how his friends act about women. But then later when the plot needs him to be attracted to one of the main female characters, suddenly he's enthused by the notion. Like, did Joe forget he was gay?

Maybe he didn't. See, here's the extra confusing part about this book. That fucking wizard and his servant are always meddling in everyone's affairs. And while I've forgotten majority of the first trilogy, I do remember that he has the abilities to manipulate people's emotional states. So with every scene that he's in, you have to wonder "is this character doing this by their own free will, or is the wizard cajoling them?" The wizard's exact motives are so mysterious, that you never know what he's manipulating and what he isn't. So who knows, maybe he forced the character to not be gay for a while. He was around after all.