very purple...

[ratcreature]

So I'm nearly finished with The Valley of Horses and the sex scenes make me want to spork my eyes. I think fanfic (of both the slash and het kind) has spoiled me with its availability (and normalcy) of at least decent sex scenes. That is, if the story is okay, the sex scenes may not be my thing, or may be gratuitous IMO, but they usually won't make me wish for a spork, so when that happens in original fiction I'm caught unprepared, though the heavy angst probably should have been a warning sign.

After a nearly ridiculous amount of overblown angst and melodrama where both Alya and Jondalar misinterpret the other and think "Oh woe! S/He thinks I'm repulsive!" or "Oh woe! I'm never going to find a mate!" etc. etc. for many, many pages, they finally have sex and it's very-- "purple" really doesn't really encompass it. I would quote, but the sex scene that I couldn't continue reading without posting to my LJ about it has been going on for pages already and is not over yet, and a short quote really wouldn't do it justice.

The book's sex scenes are certainly nowhere near the worst I've read, but still quite bad.

Comments

[derryderrydown.livejournal.com]

And there's so damn many of them! Ayla invents 69 in either the next book or the one after it. By Shelters of Stone, it's pretty much a page of sex for a page of story.

I keep reading the books because I love the world and the side characters. It's just Ayla, Jondalar and their interminable sexlife that bore me to tears.

[ratcreature]

Seriously? They get much more frequent? Oh noes!

[ratcreature]

Oh, on an additional note, at least it's the guy whose eyes are frequently described as "violet". I don't think I could have coped if it had been hers. Not that I really appreciate his eyes being violet (it somehow makes me think of freaky anime characters and their weird colors).

[catmoran.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot! I read the first few books back when they came out, and now I'm getting flashbacks.

Come to think of it, I think it's those books that turned me off to het smut.

Thank goodness for gay porn!!

[ratcreature]

Sorry about your flashbacks, but I just had to share the pain. I mean, there's only so much I could take before I needed some support...

But not all het smut is full of throbbing passages, moist depths, proud manhoods and the like. At least not in good het fanfic. But yeah, fanfic has definitely raised my porn standard.

[ilyena_sylph]

...you know, you're right, they really aren't that good...

*had to go reread one of them, curiously, as I generally skip through the sex in favor of the fun things with strange creatures and even more interesting civilizations*

[ratcreature]

*had to go reread one of them, curiously, as I generally skip through the sex in favor of the fun things with strange creatures and even more interesting civilizations*


I suspect I will be doing that a lot if I read the next books.

LOL

[dragon-smoke.livejournal.com]

I was totally waiting for this post, when I saw in a previous one that you were reading these books for the first time. I read Clan of the Cave Bear in the 6th grade and totally loved it. I thought The Valley of Horses was awesome (what middle school girl wouldn't want their own pet sabretooth tiger???) UNTIL Ayla and Jondalar finally meet. Even today I vividly remember the ick and ack feeling of those pages. Of course, that didn't stop me from bookmarking them and taking the book to school for all my friends to gawk at. :-)

If it is getting to you now, don't even bother with The Mammoth Hunters. My grandmother gave it to me for Xmas because I asked, and when I flipped through the book just to see, I was sooooo embarrassed I had her buy me something like that.

Re: LOL

[ratcreature]

Well, it was "just" a cave lion who while larger than today's lions didn't have sabre-teeth.... but yeah, I probably would have appreciated that more in sixth grade, and maybe not even have hoped that it would eat the horse already. OTOH in sixth grade I would have been bored to tears worse than now by the sex and probably grossed out. I really wasn't the most precocious kid. It took me until reading lesbian mysteries as a teenager to appreciate sex scenes.

But I get that embarrassing moment. I once put a comic by a favorite artist on my wish list, and it was really kind of explicit, which I hadn't realized when reading about it, and well, with comics it's kind of more obvious than with books...