Side Jobs by Jim Butcher

[lightreads]

Side Jobs: Stories From the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Dresden Files short stories. Jim Butcher’s capacity to write about sexual assault and rape without having any idea that he’s doing it will never cease to amaze me. That’s the uniting theme of this collection – Harry Dresden, magical slugfests, and rape culture, woo! I think my favorite bit was Harry getting turned on by watching Murphy make out with another woman on the magical equivalent of a date rape drug, and then lying to her about what happened later because it would just bother her to know. Awesome. Oh, wait, wait, no, my favorite was really when Thomas unloads all his vampire angst for pages and pages, then uses his mojo to rape a woman to death. No, I’m wrong. My absolute favorite has to be when a woman who was once mind-whammied into having a relationship with Harry that she wouldn’t have otherwise later apologizes to Harry for it. The fact that she’s a rape victim doesn’t actually make Harry a rapist, but it makes her apologizing incredibly fucked up. Perhaps nearly as fucked up as Jim Butcher not having any apparent idea he’s doing any of this shit.



. . .Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?



Oh, you know, it’s Jim Butcher. The emotional palate hits a peak complexity somewhere around the eleventh grade boy level, and most conflicts get resolved by a metaphorical dick-measuring contest, and I quite enjoyed a few of these stories. Like you do sometimes.





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Comments

[celli]

oh GOD. *crosses him off every list ever*

[ecaterin]

Oh good lord. And because it's Jim Butcher, I'm going to have to read it. And like you do sometimes, I'll quite enjoy the stories. Even while headdesking repeatedly.

Arrgh. :P

[lightreads]

Ayep. The novels are better -- the short stories are a deeply unfortunate concentration of some really creeptacular authorial choices. Oh, Jim Butcher.

...*waits for next book*

[ecaterin]

*sits on the waiting bench next to you. re-reads old stuff.*

[readerjane]

*rueful chuckle*

Harry never stops having the best intentions, and he never stops getting it wrong.

I guess, for me, that's the flaw that makes him real. Some characters have to fight their inner demons. Harry has an inner patriarch, and he doesn't even know he should be fighting it. He thinks he's doing well because he finds strong!Murphy hot, and doesn't see the dissonance between that and deciding for her what she ought to know.

[lightreads]

Oh, it's not Harry's chauvinism I'm talking about -- that's par for the course by now. It's that when you line up all these stories and realize that literally over half of them are about sexual assault, or feature a scene where it is clearly used as boy entertainment (see above re Murphy getting whammied so that Butcher could have Harry watch her nonconsensually make out with a girl), and you realize that Butcher just has no idea any of this is even remotely creepy, my skin starts crawling.