I used to really love the Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series by Laurell K. Hamilton. It featured a really kickass heroine (Anita Blake) who worked as a professional necromancer and also hunted vampires (natch). She was smart, small, had a lot of knowledge about supernatural beings, extremely gutsy, and owned an arsenal of weapons and was proficient in martial arts. The dry humour didn't hurt either. And one of the bonuses of he series was the extremely sexy male cast starring the Jean-Claude, the Vampire Master of the City. The sexual tension between them - whoo! - and then there was the introduction of Richard, the leader of the Werewold group which led to the development of a love triangle.
Everything was awesome and I looked forward to when my reservation at the library was filled.
But then something happened.
Although I was firmly in the Jean-Claude/Vampires rock! group, I found myself hating Richard as he developed into a hypocritical whiney asshole. He just brought the whole series down as far as I cared...but then something even worse happened. While I was cursing Richard for his dumb behaviour putting his Pack in danger, Anita began acquiring a lot of different powers, which initially was damn cool...but then she also turned into the woman that EVERYONE wanted to #@%! and it was like the series turned into the adventures of a woman who was extremely obliging to all those guys if they weren't evil, culminating the in the arrival of the were-leopard Micah of the giant genitalia (trust me on this - if you read the book, Anita always talks about them). Then things got a whole lot more explicit featuring things like group-sex, sadomasochism, and...er...changing during sex and while the books got exponentially thicker, this was mostly (imo) due to the increased amount of action Anita was getting as opposed to her doing any supernatural hunting.
I kept reading and cursing at the same time and then I found out something that explained the way the series turned. The character of Richard was based on Hamilton's husband...who then became her ex-husband, hence the u-turn in his characterisation. At the same time, Micah is based on her current husband...and all those declarations on how much Anita loved Micah and his gear is merely her celebration of their life together. I don't even want to think about what the symbolism of the sudden increase in kinky sex means. Hamilton defends the changes in the series being her way of challenging the expectations female-written subject matter. I suppose this is a valid argument, but since she's chosen to ruin what was essentially a series that already was challenging convention by featuring a woman who utilised violence in her day-to-day life and didn't whine about it, I can't help but roll my eyes.
Good luck to you, Ms. Hamilton. If I really wanted to read about kinky sex I'd pick up The Story of O or Anne Rice's Beauty series. For books about vampires and werewolves I'm gonna look somewhere else.
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