It's just depressing that as he keeps going back to it, it becomes so clear that he never really meant to say anything particularly interesting about gender at all. I love Cheri as an individual (and ugh, I'd forgotten that she prefers that because this book goes back to calling her Cheery, BAD SIGN), but she really is less interesting if she's only supposed to be the first example in a long list of "this is what women like, and it's all the same thing, but this one said it first."
His motives are probably good. I get the strong sense that Pratchett wants to wrap Discworld up well for everyone before he has to stop writing, but actually, it's making everything worse because his strength before was so much in making one plot turn out well and the whole messy business of life just carrying on around it, and it's becoming so clear that he doesn't really know what actual deep progress on social issues looks like.
See, I have the depressing sense that, as apparently dwarves are supposed to merely be an exact parallel to modern human gender roles as imagined by people who aren't terrible well versed in queer issues, Pepe and Madame Sharn are merely "gay people are fashion designers." Not, of course, that there's anything to object to in either canon queer people or fashion design or the conjunction of the two, but as an outlier to propel the dwarves away from rigid biological gender binaries, it's not really a grand stretch of the imagination if you've been paying attention at all for the last several decades of pop culture.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2014-04-22 08:01 pm (UTC)His motives are probably good. I get the strong sense that Pratchett wants to wrap Discworld up well for everyone before he has to stop writing, but actually, it's making everything worse because his strength before was so much in making one plot turn out well and the whole messy business of life just carrying on around it, and it's becoming so clear that he doesn't really know what actual deep progress on social issues looks like.
See, I have the depressing sense that, as apparently dwarves are supposed to merely be an exact parallel to modern human gender roles as imagined by people who aren't terrible well versed in queer issues, Pepe and Madame Sharn are merely "gay people are fashion designers." Not, of course, that there's anything to object to in either canon queer people or fashion design or the conjunction of the two, but as an outlier to propel the dwarves away from rigid biological gender binaries, it's not really a grand stretch of the imagination if you've been paying attention at all for the last several decades of pop culture.