gender!fail – books i never wrote

Well, Darci, you should really have been able to tell from Karl’s deranged monobrow that he wasn’t quite right in the head. I don’t even know whether it’s a monobrow or whether he’s just been carving random shapes in his forehead with the sharp object he is now pointing at his crotch. (Do it, Karl! your severed penis in a box is going to be so much more impressive a love token than that lame red rose!)

This is another of those creepy stories where I appear to believe that ‘leading boys on and breaking their hearts’ inevitably results in getting raped/stalked/murdered. I really don’t know whether my mind was warped by reading YA novels, or women’s magazines, or some unholy combination of the two.

and he’ll kill to get her… When this doesn’t work, he kidnaps her

This segue cracks me up, it’s so casual. I really want to know who Karl killed and why he thought this would persuade Darci to give him another chance. Or possibly it was his attempt at killing that didn’t work, so he thinks kidnapping will be easier. I don’t know why Darci’s hair is longer post-kidnapping, either she has been in captivity for a while or he has given her forcible hair extensions.

I’m not that worried about Darci, to be honest. Her chin looks like a deadly weapon. Evidently my thirteen-year-old self thought plectrum-shaped skulls were beautiful and ankle socks were cool. Note also the shoulder pads. (It was 1990-ish. I feel that shoulder pads should have gone by this stage, but then I did grow up in a cultural backwater where people wore shellsuits well into the 21st century.)

This wouldn’t fit on the scanner because it’s foolscap. It wouldn’t fit in my ringbinder either. Annoying.

The detective’s name is making me think of this stupid epitaph:

Here lies Lester Moore
Four slugs from a 44.
No Les. No Moore.

Maybe that’s meant to fit with the whole noir-ish feel I’m trying to get going here, with nightclubs and random references to the Mob? Either way, it fails.

So, anyway, here be spoilers. Obviously I didn’t want to give away the big plot twist because that’s not what blurbs do. But Sheila’s ‘bizarre’ ‘secret’ is… she was assigned male at birth. Shocking, huh? You weren’t getting that vibe from her drag queen stagename, makeup and costume at all, were you? I don’t know why the police failed to figure this out at the autopsy and had to get the info from her sister. The murder must have been really horrific 🙁 I have a vague idea that the murderer may have been an ex-lover with objections to Sheila’s trans-ness, but since I was steering clear of spoilers I can’t remember. Oh well.

I feel bad for Sheila that not only is she dead as a result of a probable hate crime, but her case is being handled by a police officer who seems more interested in perving on her sister. Plus, his unprofessional conduct is hampering the investigation, as Jacey is withholding vital evidence in case the bad people hurt him. Um, he’s a cop. Dealing with dangerous people is sort of his job.

Mainly, this production screams out to me ‘I just got a new set of Berol felt-tips and I’m going to use them!’ There is something so retro about the lettering in the title, I almost love it. Almost.

(Oh, and when I first heard of Macy Gray I was like ‘OMG she has nearly the same name as the sister in that shitty crime story I thought up several years ago.’ My brain is full of this irrelevant junk.)

NO THEY DO NOT and your boyfriend Den should be killed forthwith, along with whoever made that monstrosity Bridget is wearing. It looks like I couldn’t make my mind up where her legs should end and kept adding extra bits. (Maybe I should have done that with Jane.)

As if poor Bridget has not suffered enough having to wear purple and aqua… trouser… things, she then gets punished for being nice to the school pervert by being raped by said outcast, and then BLAMED FOR IT by her so-called best friend who is basically running around at this point going ‘nyah nyah, told you so’. What the hell is Ann doing telling Den about her best friend getting raped anyway, ugh. I hate this girl, with her big poppy eyes and look of faux-concern. She has no chin either.

In spite of Ann’s smugness I don’t see how Bridget could have known what was coming, since all Matt has done prior to becoming a rapist is ‘try’ to grope her, clearly not succeeding even in this limited aim. Oh, I forgot, Ann can ‘see him getting excited.’ (Not being the most streetwise of adolescents, I am not sure I meant what this actually means. Never mind.) So yeah, Matt has a history of failing to grope his female classmates and has had a public hard-on or two which Bridget just finds amusing… this is not saying ‘future rapist’ to me, it is saying ‘teenage boy’.

Ann seems more interested in victim-shaming and gossiping with her no-good boyfriend than oh, I don’t know, telling somebody in authority or supporting her best friend or plotting revenge on the rapist… I don’t know, this is just depressing me now. I was a reasonably switched-on fourteen-year-old (no, really, I was, I read newspapers and got As in everything) and yet I was still coming out with this horseshit. It is a pretty minor example of the mindwarping damage done by living in a rape culture, but it is an example nonetheless.

God, I hate the world sometimes.

Tag: gender!fail

oh no she didn’t

irrelevant junk

asking for shit