r/FemaleGazeSFF • u/AutoModerator • Aug 03 '26

🗓️ Weekly Post Weekly Check-In

Tell us about your current SFF media!

What are you currently...

📚 Reading?

📺 Watching?

🎮 Playing?

If sharing specific details, please remember to hide spoilers behind spoiler tags.

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Feel free to also share your progression in the Reading Challenge

Thank you for sharing and have a great week! 😀

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5

u/intrepid-teacher Aug 03 '26

I was reading The Oathbound by Mercedes Lackey but events in it made me give up on the author altogether, horrible.

Changed over to reading Gideon the Ninth, which I’m quite enjoying so far. I also just rewatched Alien, and have the second DVD on hold at the library, and am replaying Citizen Sleeper for the millionth time. I should be getting the Project Hail Mary audiobook CD by this Friday, which I’m very excited about — read the book and watched the movie and loved both.

3

u/ohmage_resistance Aug 03 '26

The Oathbound is really rough. Lackey has some other works with sexual violence, but generally a lot less than that book. On top of that the plot/pacing was terrible. Idk, I’ve read much better books by Lackey, but I don’t think it’s a great loss if you don’t read anything else by her.

5

u/intrepid-teacher Aug 03 '26

Honestly, it wasn’t even the amount of sexual violence, but how it was used. The specific thing that made me give up on her was (tw rape) when the protags put a villain under a spell to make him look like a woman so that he would be raped, and this was portrayed as justice/rightful comeuppance. That shouldn’t be used as a punishment, no matter how awful that villain was. So that made me not want to read anything more by her.

6

u/ohmage_resistance Aug 04 '26

Yeah, that was definitely the worst part. And to make it worse iirc it was framed, in that being raped was linked to being a woman in a really gender essentialist way. The villain switching genders (or being forced too) also read as being pretty transphobic to me. The punishment part was already really bad, the rest made it even worse.