Content notes for mentions of sexual coercion (sort of) and domestic violence.
When we last left Rafael, Anita and co had emptied out the communal showers in the Circus – Jean Claude’s underground lair and the least hidden daytime resting place for a vampire in the history of the genre. For this block of chapters? We’re still at the damn showers.
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Content notes: I talk about sexual assault and metaphysical and emotional manipulation leading to such.
We’re all here because I have ongoing issues with the Anitaverse but lack the common sense necessary to stop reading the series even though it has actually repeatedly set off some of my bad brain stuff. As for issues… well, they’re largely things like Nathaniel basically bullying Micah into changing his sexuality to suit him – and succeeding. Anita casually mentions it at the start of this chapter and it is… not great:
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We’re back at Rafael, beloveds, and I just… please tell me you see what I’m seeing when Rafael and his bodyguard are first introduced on the page after Anita escapes the bitch-off with Kane:
I was more bothered by Kane than I’d thought, since I didn’t sense Rafael’s energy with his main bodyguard, Benito, right beside him. Even without the otherworldly energy they were both tall: dark, muscled, and handsome for Rafael, more sinister for Benito. They both had short black hair and brown eyes, but Benito had deep facial scarring from something that looked like more than acne, but it wasn’t just the scars. I had other people in my life who had facial scars, and none of them seemed like a villainous henchman in a superhero movie, but Benito did. Maybe it was the fact that he worked so hard being scary as Rafael’s main bodyguard.
Like –
Y’all see this too right?
Like the sheer racist cringe on display here? It’s not as bad as the first time that we see Rafael introduced by how gosh darned Mexican he is, but it’s not actually that far off if you’re a recurring reader of the Anitaverse and can clock that this is basically just that? The bonus of Benito being described as menacing because of disfiguremesia – a brilliant term coined by my dear friend Mikaela a few years back – and because he’s Mexican… It just makes me itch.
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I know I said I was done with this series.
I’ve said it at least twice and you’d think it’d stick by now since the past three books have been objectively poorly crafted and have contained content I know I don’t like as well as content that has been a trigger for me in the past. Despite the fact that I don’t read things I dislike – and tell y’all to do the same all the time – I couldn’t help myself. Rafael is the book I knew from Day One of its announcement that Laurell K Hamilton had no business writing because of its focus on Mexican-American wererat and titular character Rafael.
It’s not because Hamilton is a white woman, by the way. It’s because she has a habit of writing really racist-ly for her characters of color and not growing or engaging with it. Almost thirty years into the Anita Blake Vampire Hunter series and Hamilton still trades on and writes stereotypes for the characters of color that populate her books.
So here we are with a book that really shouldn’t exist and a spork I shouldn’t be doing because I know I’m just gonna get mad by the end.
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Images in the header are from an archived version of lelola.net, a site that fueled my journey as a teenaged weeb.
While the first official piece of Weiss Kreuz media was the 1997 light novel “Weiß: Forever White”, the most well-known piece of media for the franchise is the 1998 anime series Weiss Kreuz. That initial and poorly animated series came from studio ufotable and was directed by Hitoyuki Matsui, produced by Jikenta Nishikawa an Hikaru Kondō, and was written in-house at ufotable.
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I’m returning to my Book Blogger roots for one of my favorite writers in the history of my reading life!
Matt Wallace’s latest book, the epic (in all forms) Savage Legion, is out July 21st and my little site is one of the stops on the book tour. Take a second to pop on over to Amazon or Bookshop to preorder your copy and then dive right into his guest post about two of our shared most-favorite things in the world: worldbuilding and booze!
Warriors drink ale. Nobles drink wine. That’s the way it always was and for twenty-plus years I never questioned it.
I read my first stabby magic novel (or epic fantasy, or swords and sorcery, or whatever the hell you want to call it) when I was eleven, and I never looked back. Throughout my formative years, I read whatever was on the fantasy shelf of the nearest big chain bookstore. For a long time I didn’t know enough to look beyond that shelf, or understand why it was important and incumbent upon me to do that work, especially if I ever hoped to write this stuff myself.
Realizing now how homogenized and whitewashed fantasy, like all genre fiction, has been in mainstream American publishing for so long, I see all the cracks in those piles of books and endless fantasy series I grew up reading. Millions of cracks, an endless spiderweb of them in a mirror reflecting my own faulty hardwiring and false and persistent centering.
Right now I just want to talk about the booze, though.
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Ella has a Thing. She sees a classmate grow up to become a caring nurse. A neighbor’s son murdered in a drive-by shooting. Things that haven’t happened yet. Kev, born while Los Angeles burned around them, wants to protect his sister from a power that could destroy her. But when Kev is incarcerated, Ella must decide what it means to watch her brother suffer while holding the ability to wreck cities in her hands.
Rooted in the hope that can live in anger, Riot Baby is as much an intimate family story as a global dystopian narrative. It burns fearlessly toward revolution and has quietly devastating things to say about love, fury, and the black American experience.
Ella and Kev are both shockingly human and immeasurably powerful. Their childhoods are defined and destroyed by racism. Their futures might alter the world.
It’s only February, but Tochi Onyebuchi’s Riot Baby is already of my favorite books of 2020. This novella is riveting, painful, and above all… full of familiar experiences. I started reading this book and couldn’t put it down even when it got tough. It’s just… incredible.
So I’m giving away two copies.
To enter, leave a comment on this post using a valid email telling me about a work of Black speculative fiction that has moved and/or haunted you!
I’ll choose the winners on the 29th and send you the kindle copies then!
Grayson was a series primarily created by the writer duo of Tim Seeley and Tom King with art primarily by Mikel Janin, colors by Jeromy Cox, and letters by Carlos M. Mangual. There are other writer and artist teams across this series, most notably for the final arc once the main workers were placed on other DC books. We’ll get to them in a minute since naming them will be going in hand with me fussing about them.
Following the Forever Evil event that took place across several DC books back in 2013/2014, Dick Grayson’s identity as Nightwing was revealed to the world. As a result of that identity crisis, Dick Grayson goes undercover to hide his connection to Batman/Bruce Wayne at St. Hadrian’s, a private finishing school for female supervillains and spies first seen in Batman, Incorporated. So Dick winds up doing double duty as a spy and as a teacher to the next generation of spies, all going along with Dick’s globetrotting adventures as an agent of the mysterious SPYRAL.
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“Peggy, that’s my wife, she’s a lycanthrope.”
The Lunatic Café (Anita Blake #4)
Shapeshifters are people too.
At least, that’s what Laurell K Hamilton is trying to convince us and Anita across the twenty-six books in her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series: one of the core themes across the Anitaverse is the idea that shapeshifters are people and they deserve the consideration that people get.
It’d be an admirable approach to take if not for how Hamilton sets up shifters and their pack dynamics. Shifter society and the dynamics between members in a particular group towards insiders and outsiders – especially if those outsiders are human – really make you question what she’s actually succeeding at.
For this pint-sized primer, we’re going to be talking about the main shape-shifter groups Anita interacts with across the Anitaverse – wolves, leopards, hyenas, tigers, and lions, the lone prey group in the whole dang thing, swans – and why Hamilton’s worldbuilding and her rationale behind using shapeshifters as metaphor for various marginalized identities remains more full of holes than a slice of Swiss cheese.
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I’m still hoping the ardeur is temporary.
The last installment, I told y’all to make sure that you had alcohol ready because we were getting into the really stressful parts of the Anita Blake series. While it’s not as rough as I expected, it’s still something that drove me to crave a drink or two.
Narcissus in Chains is the tenth book in Laurell K Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and the start of what I view as the downward slide of the series’ trajectory.
Set some six months after Obsidian Butterfly, Anita has finally decided that she’s ready to restart things with Richard and Jean-Claude so that their power base isn’t left vulnerable. She makes this decision right around the time that a mysterious shapeshifter starts targeting the people in the various packs that she has sworn to protect. Which is great timing considering the power boost that they all get as a result of her return.
While the official blurb for the book makes it sound like a dark mystery and a battle for Anita’s very soul are bound up in the novel (“Nothing can save Anita from a twist of fate that draws her ever closer to the brink of humanity–to finally surrender to the bloodlust, the beast, and the desire transforming her body and consuming her soul.”), the actual book is… way more boring than you’d think.Read More »
“Vampires are People, too.”
– The button that Monica Vespucci is wearing when she and Anita first meet echoes a repeated message in this series about how vampires are people too. But people you know… suck. So vampires do too, and not just because it’s how they get nourishment.
MP3:
Source Post: The Great Big Anita Blake Reread – Guilty Pleasures
I’m trying to make my work more accessible to a larger audience so that means Patreon-first recordings of me reading my longer essays and parts of my various series at the $1 Tier before they get put up here.
If there’s a post you couldn’t make it through because of its length and would prefer having as an audio file, drop me a line and I’ll bump it up the list!
As I’ve dragging my heels on finishing Narcissus in Chains (Anita Blake #10) for the next installment of my reread series, I’ve realized that there’s one small problem with how I talk about the Anitaverse. I keep assuming that you all have already read the series and are familiar with how everything works and therefore I don’t slow down to explain things that are probably confusing to the uninitiated.
So for the next two or three months, I’ll be writing mini-primers to three of the biggest worldbuilding bits that are semi-constant across the Anitaverse that I haven’t explained (but really need to before I keep going any further).
For this month, I’ll be covering the ardeur.
Content warnings for this primer: descriptions of sexual assault, “fuck or die”/”sex pollen” scenarios, rape culture, and sex-negative feminism framed as “sex positive” feminism, homophobia, a reference to an adult having sex with a teenager
“I thought you would be angry with me for giving you the ardeur, the fire, the burning hunger.”
The ardeur is first named in the thirteenth chapter of Narcissus in Chains after Micah assaults Anita in the previous chapter while she’s under her first brush of the ardeur.
In the chapter, after Anita shamefully admits to having sex with Micah (and again, it was rape), Jean-Claude confesses to having hidden this power from her and to denying his own hunger for sex because he know she wouldn’t approve.
Here’s the first of many issues with the ardeur.
Prior to this book, there’s nothing within the Anitaverse that tells us that Jean-Claude has this power hidden within his body.Read More »
Note: this installment covers and talks about racism. sexual violence, and gaslighting in mild detail for the most part. In the final part, I also mention some of the upcoming events in the Anitaverse including a reference to Anita having sex with an underage character and her sexual assault in the next book.
Edward had saved my life more than once. I’d saved his more than once. Yet . . . yet . . . I’d miss Edward, but I’d kill him if I had to. Edward wonders why I’m so sympathetic to the monsters. The answer is simple. Because I am one.
I’m going to be perfectly honest with y’all: for many years, Obsidian Butterfly (Anita Blake #9) was the closest I ever came to having a favorite Anita Blake book.
Back when I’d first read it, just a little out of order and after all of the relationship drama and wonky sex scenes of the following books, I’d thought it was a captivating book that managed to push the relationship shit to the back of the book and focus on more human monsters instead of the main plot dealing with how awful vampires and shifters are (but telling us to empathize with them anyway).
Rereading it, I’ve realized that I was mostly… wrong.
In Obsidian Butterfly, Anita travels to Santa Fe, New Mexico after the ever-cryptic Edward – the bounty hunter and killer for hire that we last saw back when Mr. Oliver rolled into town a bunch of books back – calls in the favor that Anita somehow owes him because she… killed his partner at the time, a man who was actively trying to kill her. You know, because that makes all of the sense.
What’s waiting for Anita in Santa Fe?
Only a spate of grotesque murders and mutilations, Edward’s engagement to a woman that doesn’t know who and what he really is, henchmen with an axe to grind for their boss, and preternatural beings that are somehow even more messed up than the ones she’d left behind in St. Louis.
While a lot of things about Obsidian Butterfly don’t hold up almost twenty years after it was published, it’s actually… not that far from what I remembered and all in all, not an entirely un-enjoyable read in part because the main plot is one of the most solid across the Anitaverse to this day.
Strap yourselves in for another ridiculously long installment of my Great Big Anita Blake ReRead. I’ve got stuff to say about everything the novel did really well, what it still sucks at, and the one thing I wish I could carve out of the book with my bare bloody hands.
A week late, I’ve come to gift y’all with a list of five of my favorite romance/erotic romance series.
I hope they bring you as much enjoyment as they’ve brought me!
Happy (A Week After) Valentine’s Day!
First things first here is a list of charities that you can (and should) donate to in order to help people directly affected by the government shutdown here in the US. Many of these people aren’t going to get paid even once the government re-opens and right now they’re suffering greatly. If you can donate, you can help someone get a little bit of financial security in these trying times.
Now, some backstory:
In October 2013, the US government was shut down for several days as a result of the Republican congress really hating the idea of letting the United States people get anything close to universal healthcare.
In response to the shutdown and ostensibly for her readers impacted by the shutdown as government workers, Laurell K. Hamilton posted “Shutdown”, a short story (or, more likely, a deleted scene from the novel that had come out in July of the same year, Affliction) about the werewolf alpha Richard Zeeman introducing his newest human lover to Anita Blake and her main-shapeshifter squeeze, the wereleopard alpha Micah Callahan. This 7200-word story is a quick and frustrating look into the life of one of Anita’s former main lovers.
As Hamilton posted this story with good intentions and reuploaded it with the threat – I mean, promise – to figure out a sequel or original short story if the shutdown continues – with good intentions as well, I am sporking it with the best intentiions at heart. I would appreciate it if my followers/readers donated to one of the charities or organizations I linked to at the beginning of this piece.
So, now that you’ve (hopefully) donated to an organization that’s going to help folks impacted by the government shutdown, let’s start the sporking (for a good cause). The usual trigger warnings for any conversation about the Anitaverse apply here as I’ll be talking about the consent issues in the short, internalized misogyny, kink/sex shaming, and sexual violence. So read carefully if you can!
Note: If you prefer to listen to your sporking, here’s the MP3 narration I did! Don’t forget to donate, you nerds!
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Stitch's Media Mix 
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