Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: geeky
  • Music: The Bloodhound Gang, 'Bad Touch.'

Plot with porn vs. porn with plot.

Saturday, I stopped in at the Other Change of Hobbit to pick up copies of the July issue of Locus Magazine and chatter with the staff, since they're all super-interested in the whole process, which means I can talk about it without feeling like I'm being a weird obsessive. (Seriously, right now, I could talk about the publishing process for about three days without stopping, and since new things keep happening, I keep getting more things to talk about. I am a faintly neurotic soul who likes to talk things to death. Having people who are actively interested and ask me questions spares all the rest of my friends from a death worse than fate.) Being as I was in the store and already spending money, I decided to browse around and see whether I could find anything I particularly wanted to read.

Now, I am a reader of urban fantasy. That's probably part of why I became a writer of urban fantasy. (My lifelong obsession with folklore probably explains the rest.) I've watched the growth of the genre with delight shading into bewilderment -- delight because there are so many awesome titles out there these days, bewilderment because about half the covers show women crouching in black vinyl catsuits and wearing impractical heels. None of my urban fantasy heroines would be caught dead in a black vinyl catsuit, wearing impractical heels. And they don't, as a rule, crouch. All the other covers show half-naked women or carefully chosen bits of women, usually accessorized with some sort of weapon. That's actually a little more understandable. There are lots of way to get a character naked.

As I sifted through stack after stack of urban fantasies I'd never heard of before, I realized one horrible, irritating thing: I couldn't tell the porn-with-plot from the plot-with-porn. I've already read most of the 'sure things' -- the books I know meet my specific preferences in terms of the balance of 'sex' to 'not sex' -- and what I was left with was a whole lotta books where their back cover blurbs could have made them anything from the next Anita Blake to, well, the next any heroine who can keep her pants on for more than six pages at a stretch.

It's not that I dislike porn-with-plot. I read romance novels -- hell, I write romance novels -- and sometimes there's a very good reason to get everybody hot and bothered. It's just that I really prefer to choose my erotica, rather than accidentally tripping over it and falling into a puddle of unexplainable fluid. This isn't the fault of the authors. This is just, well, packaging combining with genre trends to leave me deeply perplexed. But there is a solution!

The pie chart.

I say we start stamping all urban fantasies somewhere discrete with little pie chart symbols detailing the ratio of 'plot' to 'porn.' If that sounds too judgmental, we could go with the ratio of 'naked' to 'clothed,' or even 'sexual tension,' 'action,' and 'actual pay-off.' I'd wind up following series where they started with a lot of the sexual tension pie and moved on to the actual pay-off pie after I was already invested in the relationship, while other people could go straight to the 'lots of kinky sex' pie, and everybody would win! Also, I wouldn't accidentally stumble across sex scenes that would make a porn star blush. Again, everybody wins.

Now to sell it to marketing...
Tags: contemplation, literary critique, silliness
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  • 12 comments

tigertoy

July 8 2008, 14:56:06 UTC 8 years ago

I'm all for plenty of explicit sex in books. A good writer can even make kinks I'm not at all into interesting to read about. But it doesn't substitute for a solid plot and characters that are actually interesting people (not just interesting sex objects). When the plot is either not there at all or just blatantly contrived to bring about the next situation the author's trying to reach, it's a bad book -- whether or not that situation is a great sex scene.

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm all for books without any sex at all, too -- if long as the lack of sex actually fits. When characters that obviously belong in bed together just talk about the weather, it can be as annoying as truly gratuitous sex that has nothing to do with the story or the characters. I read a fair number of books packaged as YA. Some of them feel like the author has blatantly edited out the sex so it can be YA. On the other hand, there are books that feel like the author has blatantly inserted some sex so it *won't* be YA.)