(no subject)

Femslash wank. *OMG dies laughing*

Yeah. Not touching that debate with a ten foot pole.

So I went to see George R. R. Martin yesterday. (I think you disgruntled femslashers ought to read his books, actually. More on that later.) It was at the Astor Place Barnes & Noble, which is tiny, so naturally it was packed with hundreds of people, lined up through all three levels of the store. Luckily, I got there massively early and saved two seats in the second row for drujan and queenofthorns, who just barely got there in time to claim their seats before the ravening crowds snatched the seats away.

You can see my (red) hair in this photo, front left.

Martin gave a prepared talk, explained the five year gap for the billionth time, and answered a few questions. The only new one was "Is Syrio Forel really dead?" Martin told us to figure it out for ourselves (I'd always assumed he was dead, and I took from his answer that I was correct). Someone asked about errors, and Martin pointed out that he and his editor both missed the fact that his horses keep changing genders (that was pretty funny, the gender-bendng horses).

Someone also asked if he'd change his story if the audience figured out an important plot point (such as Rheager + Lyanna = Jon), and Martin said no, he wouldn't change his story, and he specifically avoids the discussion boards for that reason. Notably, he didn't repeat the Rheager/Lyanna bit when he repeated the question, which I took as a pretty good indication that the theory is correct. He also asked the audience to raise hands if they'd ever participated in the message board--there were quite a few, but certainly not the majority. Oh, and someone wasted a question asking if we'd ever have a Hodor point of view (Martin joked about a chapter that would be 27 pages of "Hodor, hodor, hodor, hodor").

Then we had to line up for the signing, and here's where we were *really* lucky to be up front, because we were the first ones to get our books signed. This thing must've gone for *hours* after we were done.

So I was all nervous, and I only had one question, but I wasn't planning to actually ask it. However, when I got up there and couldn't think of anything else to say, I suddenly went for it anyway. So I basically asked (but less coherently, because I was nervous): "You've had two lesbian sex scenes, so would you please balance it out by having a boy on boy sex scene?" And when he looked at me like "What?" I added "A Loras/Renly flashback would be really nice." (Those are his two hot gay male characters.) To which he responded "Loras/Renly, I'll keep that in mind" and laughed.

Erm, yeah. I don't know if it's *that* inappropriate a question, because he does have gay male characters, and he has written two explicit lesbian sex scenes but no explicit gay male sex scenes, so really, he's playing into the whole male gaze thing by showing us the girls hooking up but not the boys. Y'know? I love that he has gay characters and I always rec the series to people by pointing out how politically progressive it is, but you can definitely read it as playing into society's male biases by showing girlsex but not boysex.

Anyway, he seemed to think the question was amusing rather than offensive, so that was good.

By the way, here's a link to the Time Magazine article that calls Martin "The American Tolkien." If you haven't read the series yet, it's quite a good explanation of why you should.