(no subject)

[which_chick]

Sometimes I feel like my life consists of poor judgment events followed by Bart Simpson blackboard lessons. Like with Bart, I never really get any better... I just drift into different incorrect behaviors.



The Bart Simpson blackboard lesson for today is I will not stay up all night reading elf porn books. It's not even as if it were a particularly *stellar* elf porn book. It was a satisfactory elf porn book, equipped with elves that come in (sorry) about as many not-found-in-nature colors as My Little Ponies. I mention this because the elves in question are described in a detailed and loving fashion, the better to make them sock puppets dancing in the reader's head. There isn't anything wrong with this, precisely, and it's conveniently nice in a smut book so that I don't have to resort to my sterling imagination to *ahem* flesh out the characters. I'm also mostly inured to purple prose from (literally) years of reading gushy slash fanfic. That said, I am kind of glad that Mr. Pink-hair-and-lavender-skin got morphed into a ball of flesh with his twin sister, though. I don't know if I could have tolerated hawt sexor with someone colored like easter candy. (That'd be just *wrong*. Unless, of course, it's anime. Anime people are allowed.)

On the plus side of the elf porn book, they have better names than My Little Ponies and the Care Bears, which is reassuring. They're also unexpectedly pronounce-able. Yay! Also, they have sex, which I'm virtually certain My Little Ponies never did. (Care Bears, on the other hand -- I'm sure you all remember the link, right? Care Bears have bdsm sex0r. It's true! I read it on teh intarweb.) Anyway, the elf porn was amusing enough to keep me up way past bedtime even though I'm out of practice at reading het. Seriously. That part was weird. Tentacles -- well, I'm an old hand at tentacles (it's the anime), so that wasn't much of a problem for me.

You get a plot summary because I'm feeling generous and because, well, I have a lot of mocking bottled up inside of me to use up. (Mostly this is guilt-related because I really should not have enjoyed the elf porn as much as I actually did. Admittedly, some of the enjoyment was meta-enjoyment at the amount of mockery I would be able to generate regarding the novel but there was also a nontrivial amount of enjoyment over the book itself. That Doyle is a hottie.)

Meredith (our heroine) is an elf princess in hiding. She is leading a more-or-less normal life in a detective agency but things go wahoonie-shaped and she gets drug back to court (her aunt is queen, her cousin is second in line to the throne, and she's third.) where she discovers that her aunt, who is not particularly nice, is naming her co-heir with her sick fuck of a cousin. The person who gets to be monarch (the cousin is male) is the one who breeds first. So that our heroine has a good selection, the aunt-queen offers up her guard of nearly thirty celibate (by the queen's order) elf men. (That's where things got a bit My Little Pony, imho.) The cousin (and/or his underlings) keep trying to kill her but Meredith (who is largely not stupid) gets him locked away for six months or so. And then she gathers up a stable of suitably pretty elf men from what amounts to the secretarial pool and heads back to LA to resume detectoring when she's not busy having sex.

I love this. Not only does Meredith have her pick of pretty elf men (all of which have hair down to their asses or longer -- and amazingly, every fucking bit of elf sex takes place without anyone ever being on anyone else's hair -- urinating dog, urinating dog. If you have long hair or have ever fucked anyone with long hair, you know that this is not particularly realistic.), but she has permission from her sovereign to fuck 'em with enthusiasm. They are not *allowed* to get upset about the others being there and, since they've mostly been celibate (and that includes wanking, we're told) for hundreds of years, she could be a troll and they'd still want her. And she's not a troll.

Yeah. I realize that this is not particularly a realistic book. It's a fantasy novel. If I were going for a fantasy where there were pretty elf men for me to fuck, I'd want a nice selection of same and the freedom to bang 'em singly or in groups without having to administrate dumb-ass jealous infighting. Works for me, honestly, and I'm not going to be mad about it for being what it is.

People who might be wanting to read the elf porn book are advised that it's really not stellar. It's satisfactory, if what you're looking for is tolerable het elf porn. I mean, there's a plot and stuff. There's some detectoring. There's political stuff. There are *lots* of dangling plot threads and, as you might reasonably expect, there are sequels. But it's not literature, okay? Don't go get this and tell me that I led you into slushy chick-wank-books involving elves when you were expecting something more literary. The author DOES write better than Night Travels of the Elven Vampire (which I think will probably be my gold standard for shitty writing for now and ever) but so do a lot of people, including me.

Anyway, here's the elf porn book, which is called A Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton.

Comments

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I am well aware of the lesbians in het-guy porn. I was giving you my unedited pre-civilization-filter thoughts on the subject. Generally, I tend to clean up that sort of thing a little before releasing it into the wild rather a lot like I comb my hair and put on unrumpled clothing before I go out of the house.

I can tolerate rather a lot of faerie bushwalla, particularly if it involves a selection of My Little Pony elves. I might could also tolerate more than a little of the dating of werewolves and vampires. I'll see what the local book shop has available. They are, as gwangi pointed out, little popcorn books but reading and/or enjoying same (on the normal-people level or on a meta-enjoyment-with-mocking level) is not particularly wrong.