Welcome to my world

Syd got a glimpse into my world this week. She's reading the first book in a series about dragons in the Napoleonic Era. Now, Syd doesn't know a huge amount about Napoleon, or his era, but she knows a few things. In short, she knows that dragons change everything. The problem is, this isn’t Changed Everything world, it’s The Napoleonic Era world… MIT DRAGONS!

One of the things she said bothered her was that there are women who are dragon riders, but they’re kept secret lest anyone know that women can ride dragons and they don’t even do it side saddle. Now… there have always been dragons in this world, and some dragon types will only let girls fly on them, presumably because being a dragon is the next best thing to being a bicycle seat. And there have always been dragons, but because we want this set in the Napoleonic Era (mit dragons) we only acquired them last week even thought WE’VE ALWAYS HAD THEM!

You see my point? Why would generations of women allow themselves to be silent so some men wouldn’t realize that girls are putting something far larger between their legs than the tiny tadgers of said men? The women’s movement is inexorably linked to women having power, money and status. Remember Scarface? First you get the money, then you get the power, then you get the women! And since there are more openly gay or bisexual women now than ever, they’re clearly following the pattern. The women’s movement more or less got going in a serious way when they started having jobs of their own and thus money of their own. If they had jobs, and fucking dragons, why would they keep quiet? How do you keep that secret? How do you force them not to tell? Particularly when the little slips of girls are MIT DRAGON! You can’t tell a girl mit dragon that she doesn’t need to worry her fluffy little head about things when she can have her dragon eat your face. Mit Dragon is like having money and power all at once, and as such they are only one step away from some really screwy dragony slashy fanfic that crosses over with George from Feed for some unknown reason.

She’s not bothered by these things enough to not enjoy the books, but she gets the problems I sometimes have. See, this is what every book, movie, comic, and finger painting project done by a 2 year old is like for me. I was very “Welcome to my world” about the whole thing.

This is one of the reasons fantasy movies, particularly one that have pretensions about being well researched, fail for me. I spend the whole time being distracted by problems that even a first year student should have pointed out. You can’t have that sword with that armor, that armor is useless against swords like the one you’re holding and you either know that or you’re dead. You can’t have that jacket and those cloaks, the stitch for that jacket made cloaks like that superfluous and besides those are peasant clothes and you’re supposed to be a nobleman… you jackasses. It’s worse when it’s a shitty movie/show about shitty people being shitty to each other. I loose interest when the only people I don’t completely hate for being assholes I hate for falling prey to To Build a Fire Syndrome.

I’ll talk about TBFS later though.