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Why I'll take Japanese fandoms over just about anything
Because I find nothing inherently risible in the term 'venom cock' and wonder why people here are laughing themselves sick at it.
Because IMHO the whole concept could have worked if written well and where was the editor at the firm that published the book to ensure that it was?
Because all the other dragon books published here are set in fantasy worlds modelled closely on European history and I finally agree with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nojojojo, that one is old. To say nothing of culturally confining.
Because while westerners are going 'sex with dragons ewww bestiality!' Saiyuuki fandom writes Hakuryuu x Hakkai.
Because if we judge by the same pictorial and textual evidence that supports Gojou x Hakkai, Hakkai x Sanzou, Sanzou x Gokuu, Gokuu x Sanzou, Sanzou x Hakkai, Gojou x Sanzou et alia ad infinitem, then Hakuryuu x Hakkai is *canon.*
And that, m'lud, is the case for the defence.
Because IMHO the whole concept could have worked if written well and where was the editor at the firm that published the book to ensure that it was?
Because all the other dragon books published here are set in fantasy worlds modelled closely on European history and I finally agree with
nojojojo, that one is old. To say nothing of culturally confining.Because while westerners are going 'sex with dragons ewww bestiality!' Saiyuuki fandom writes Hakuryuu x Hakkai.
Because if we judge by the same pictorial and textual evidence that supports Gojou x Hakkai, Hakkai x Sanzou, Sanzou x Gokuu, Gokuu x Sanzou, Sanzou x Hakkai, Gojou x Sanzou et alia ad infinitem, then Hakuryuu x Hakkai is *canon.*
And that, m'lud, is the case for the defence.
My deprived childhood
Zeus turning into a bull and ravishing Europa /was/ in Myths of the Greeks. I wonder why.
You may be right though- I bet they don't teach myths at all in school, and no-one gives you Myths of the Anythings as birthday presents any more. (The boxed set of Matantei Loki Ragnarok, yes.) Thus the decline of our Great Western Heritage.
Re: My deprived childhood
Ah, North Carolina.
I have just won the book in question in a drawing inspired by the whole dust-up, and I can't say I'm not awfully curious.
Re: My deprived childhood
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The author makes a good attempt to be non-European-based. I'm in favour of that.
I'm not particularly shocked by the actual concept of the whole "secret rites of sex with dragons" in itself. I mean, come on. You know me. I bought the thing. ;) (Plus, um. Not actual full coupling. Just dragon tongue as part of secret holy rite.)
I'm just currently wincing and going for some nice reassuring pseudo-Arthuriana because the writing is bad. It's not just that it needs a good thorough edit. The heroine is a whining, annoying, depressive, wretched specimen who admittedly has an appalling life but who does very little to make me want to go on reading the book. Everything is depressing and hopeless. It's not fun to read.
And from having read it: the whole "venom cock" thing isn't the dragons themselves, it's the response of the men who handle the dragons to dragon venom. To quote:
---
(the setting is a big yearly procession where the apprentices to the dragon-handlers get publicly flogged with whips dipped in dragon venom)
The inductees came first, some stumbling and ashen in terror, others lock-jawed and stiff-necked, eyes fixed not on today or tomorrow or even the near future, but ons ome distant time when they might earn this crowd's awe and reverence. A dreamtime, that, a phantom time.
The servitors came next, several years older, much fewer in number, as fearful as the inductees but able to control it with discipline and bravado. Their necks, backs, chests, arms, and calves all bore the snakelike scars of previous Mombe Taros. They knew what they had to endure that day and knew it intimately.
Last came the veteran dragonmaster apprentices, the ones who'd walked the Lashing Lane many times and whose bodies were bas-relief maps of scars. There were only seven of these, all between age sixteen and twenty. All had entered Arena and survived. All burned with the fervor of achieving master status, of becoming the next dragonmaster of Clutch Re. Chances were, they wouldn't. A dragon claw or fang or a fellow apprentice would put them early into a sepulchral tower. Maybe this year, maybe the next.
But such cogency has no place in the mind of a veteran apprentice.
Right away, I noticed their erections. Truth, I'd been looking for them, as had Waisi and Kobo's twins, Rutvia and Makvia. All four of us poked each other and tittered. Behind us, Mother yanked on Waisi's and the twins' braids with her strong potter's hands. She even yanked on my own scabby bristle, causing instant tears. We paid heed. Unwise while in the presence of so much masculinity to mock the phallus.
Yeli's Dono still pranced beside me like one crazed.
"Lookit the thize of that one!" he bellowed. "That'th a cock, hey-o!" He tugged on his own little thing beneath his dirty loincloth.
A venom cock, they're called. I'd heard the words grunted respectfully among pottery clan men. I'd also heard the words mentioned by women wearing a carefully blank expression cultivated to hide opinion. Understand, women do not revere the venom cock as men do. They see it for what it is; an uncontrollable reaction to an impending event, and a slightly foolish reaction at that.
Dono's reverence was a mystery to me back then, made all the more mysterious by his assertions about what a venom cock could do: slay a woman! Cripple a baby! Turn pleasurers into deaf, blind, barren idiots!
The only truth I knew about the subject was what my eyes told me. The veteran apprentices looked mighty silly waddling up the lane to the whipping bar, their penises pointing the way.
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(So is Hakuryuu x Hakkai)I know. People were still going Eww dragons giving head.
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And having read
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Surely, she says bad-temperedly, only twelve year olds really think that?
and venom anything is funny (with that connotation of cheesy arcade fighter ninja attack).
Now I must wonder how many of the publishing world titterers have played arcade fighting games. Not many, I would have thought, but maybe it really is the pastime of the masses and I'm just out of date.
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Then I wish they'd stated their reaction more as 'verbal diarrhea oi vey' and less as 'venom cock teehee.'
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And this
The heroine is a whining, annoying, depressive, wretched specimen who admittedly has an appalling life but who does very little to make me want to go on reading the book.
reminds me a lot of the heroine of a couple of books I read a few years ago. I can't remember the title of the first one, but the second one is "A Man Rides Through." It basically is the story of, middle-20s modern-day woman somehow magickally faps into her mirror and hey! it's a ren-faire-like fantasy world with knights, princes and princesses, etc. and so forth, and hey again! she turns out to be Rilly Rilly Important somehow (it rankled of Mary Sueism) and winds up Saving The World (cos she's the only one who can, you know). And she was just an unbelievably whiny, annoying git, and the desire to smack her silly was really overwhelming at times.
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Very good sense. Her vocabulary clearly needs someone to rein it in because otherwise it goes gallopping off in all directions.
Whiny annoying may be justified by circumstances and/or projection ie 'if I were in this situation I'd whine a lot so my heroine will too' but as
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