PC027: Red Riding-Hood’s Child

[Rachel Swirsky]

Just a couple notes, from an editorial/pedant's perspective: ;-)

(I remember them noting one early version of Sleeping Beauty that featured her waking to the suckling of her infant child, not the prince's kiss -- the prince had already been there, raped her in her sleep, and was long gone.)

Yeah, Sleeping Beauty actually isn't a traditional folk tale. It was a novel written, I think, in the Victorian era. And she wasn't wakened by a kiss -- the prince raped her in her sleep, and she gave birth to twins.

Anyway, kudos to the author for stepping outside and having some gay leads.  I love my podcast community and the fantasy stories I've found out there and this is the first one (that I've found) to feature a gay themed story.

It sucks that this is the case, but I'm glad we were able to bring you something that you liked.

I really believe in freedom of speech and expression, but this particular subject gives me the creeps.  Having been a prosecutor for the past 12 years, I have seen people who use this type of "first experience" literature as inspiration for bringing their own criminal fantasies into reality.  And then use it as a justification for the harm they have done, saying that if society approves because it is published, it must be all right, regardless of the damage done to the victim.  You, as the publisher, may not intend for that to be your message.  But that is what some take away from that particular episode.

If this story took place in the modern era, you might have a point. However, sexual mores have changed (drastically) through time, and perhaps even more drastically from region to region. When PodCastle runs stories that take place not-now, not-here, sometimes they will show things that fit the morality of the region where the story takes place rather than the morality of our own culture.

[Old Man Parker]

Good Story!
Lots of great fairy tale imagry. Sex with a minor? The old woman says "You are no longer a boy." - so, come on, he old enough to have sex. Kudos for picking the right sounding reader, by the by.
Funny how women can write such great gay fictional characters. This made me think of the amazing vampire works of Poppy Z. Brite.

[badbaleroybrown]

 Note to self - never, EVER skip the intro again. NEVER!

and EWWWWWW.

I'm hetero. But pretty sure I wouldn't have enjoyed this if the protagonist were female .  The graphic sex didn't really move the story forward. All in all it was a pretty weak story offering all the plot one might expect from cheap porn. The only thing that made this fantasy was warewolves. The characters could have been space aliens, elves, (or cowboys) without changing the story a bit.

[MacArthurBug]

I, personally, really liked this.  Dark, sexy, a little scary.  Great as a whole.  Luckally I listen to casts BEFORE I let my daughter listen (She loves the castle) and warned her about this one.   I personally liked it, she listned for a bit and skipped it - having decided she didn't like it.

[redrum71]

Loved it! Kudos to the author and narrator.

I'm more of an Escape Pod and Pseudopod fan, but stories like this one will keep me coming back to PodCastle.   

[Rachel Swirsky]

I personally liked it, she listned for a bit and skipped it - having decided she didn't like it.

Ha. I used to do that as a kid. My parents would rent an R-rated move, I'd watch with them for five minutes, and then wander off, completely bored. It's one reason I don't have much of an intuitive understanding for why ratings are important, personally. As a kid, I, at least, was pretty good at filtering for my own maturity level. Sex? Eh. I'd rather go read in my room.

[Anarkey]

If you liked this story, I would recommend Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette's collaborative effort "A Companion to Wolves".  It's quick and easy reading, with plenty of man on man action and companion wolves (though no direct wolf-man action).

[JoeFitz]

Yeah, Sleeping Beauty actually isn't a traditional folk tale. It was a novel written, I think, in the Victorian era. And she wasn't wakened by a kiss -- the prince raped her in her sleep, and she gave birth to twins.

I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.

http://www.surlalunefairytales.com/sleepingbeauty/history.html

[JoeFitz]

Double standards re gender roles is one of the reasons I went the direction I did with this story.  (How interesting that so many people have fixed on the mention of slash in the intro, but not the mention of deconstruction!)

Slash, ironically, is less hard er... difficult to grasp... er... understand than Deconstruction.

[JoeFitz]

I did find the sex scene somewhat ridiculous; I found myself wishing it was either less explicit, or moreso, but the line about how a part of the wolf's body that was previously deflated was now sticking out, without actually naming the bodypart in question, felt a bit juvenile to me.

Agreed. Had those passages been absent, I think it would have still be perfectly obvious what was going on.

[l33tminion]

Agreed. Had those passages been absent, I think it would have still be perfectly obvious what was going on.

*shrugs*  True enough, but I've (sadly) seen much worse uses of euphemism.

[ladyjai]

Good thing I tend to multitask when listening to Pod stories, otherwise I'd want my 25 minutes back.

Not being familiar with slash, I only had a hint of what might happen. I still found the purpose of the story to be not worth my time. A coming of age sex scene which changes the main character into a human killing monster? I don't think the characters were built well enough for me to buy it.

We never got enough of character development between him and Baba to allow for him seeing her death to be the inspiration to go predator. I realize I see things through my own, not so darkly lit world, but I honestly half expected him to go wolfy so he could have the power to kill the monster, and then as a result, became the monster.

The MC really didn't seem to be setup to fully make that transformation from obedient kid who had no passions into bloodthirsty monster. Where were the hints that something darker lurked in his soul?

And why didn't the blacksmith ever kill the villagers? Or was he going to let his new companion run amock, since his sole purpose was obtaining the kid?

And did anyone have thoughts that, since this IS a red riding hood kidlet story and the blacksmith "killed" the wolf who took her innocence, that the MC could be actually the blacksmith's SON. Especially if he had wolfy blood in him already.
It was hinted that she was a whore, but the story relies on our knowing a prior fairy tale. why wouldn't a deflowered girl be forced into whoredom to support herself and her new child?

I'll be glad for a different variety of tea next week.

[Hilary Moon Murphy]

Well, this one certainly got more than its share of controversy... Both here and in the comments on the story itself.

As I said... I enjoyed this one.  But I don't mind stories with sex and shapeshifters.  My only complaint is that there was no place where the narrative surprised me.  It went right where I expected it to.

Hmm

[Rain]

I dont want to be a prude of anything but this story has really lowered opinion of Podcastle a little, poorly written slashfiction like this seems way below the normal standard of quality you get here. I dont mind slashfiction in general and if i ever read it, it is just to laugh at how bad it is, it is not something i expected from a "serious" podcast that has shown it can get good stories.

[TimWhite]

I wanted to give myself a few days before I replied on this one, so that perhaps I could come up with something more eloquent than my first reaction, which was a vehement "W....T.....F?".

While the homosexuality of the story threw me for an initial loop that I quickly got over, it was the forced pedophilic sex ("I'll give you the illusion of freewill, but in the end remove your other options so as to give you no choice but to come back and do things my way") that ended up leaving me shaking my head in a "I'm not sure if I can trust the editors of this podcast" manner.

Regardless of historical precedent, this story felt like simple softcore furry slash, with an overly long and pretentious setup and an unwelcome overtone of manipulative pedophilic incestuous (hello, blacksmith and his mother) rape.  Which I'm sure one could find plenty of on the internet, were one seeking such.

I understand from the other comments that is wasn't "technically" pedophilia by standards-of-the-time-oh-wait-its-fantasy-what-time-are-we-really-talking-about-here-I-don't-recall-hearing-a-date, but the overtone was unmistakable and not allayed by offhand comments about marriageable age interspersed with repeated allusions to unspoiled innocence.

The only thing that kept me listening all the way till the end was the vain hope that there would be some sort of interesting twist.  But, no.

As a writer, I hate writing responses like this, because I'd hate to get a response like this to my work.  So, I'm targeting this response at the editors, because while the story might have value in another venue, in this venue, it not only didn't work, but it lowered my (and from the responses I see above a lot of other people's) opinion of PodCastle.

But in the end, all those words don't come close to my initial and continuing reaction, which is still "W....T....F?"

Tim

[stePH]

And why didn't the blacksmith ever kill the villagers? Or was he going to let his new companion run amock, since his sole purpose was obtaining the kid?

And did anyone have thoughts that, since this IS a red riding hood kidlet story and the blacksmith "killed" the wolf who took her innocence, that the MC could be actually the blacksmith's SON. Especially if he had wolfy blood in him already.

Did you hear the same story I did?  The blacksmith wasn't the wolf.  The kid ran away from the blacksmith to the wolf.  I imagined that the first place he would go after his becoming wolf would be to exact his revenge on the smith.

[vilate]

I haven't decided whether or not I really enjoyed this story, but it sure has stuck with me.

I understand the negative comments about the sex scene and the story in general, but I don't necessarily agree with the negative.  Yes, the sex put me a little off, but the deeper aspects of it (no pun intended) got into the transformation between human and wolf.  It was painful for the character but in the end, he got what he wanted and he made the difference between himself and the villagers a tangible thing.  He put a physical shape to what he'd always been ostracized for.

The story may not have given a lot of twists and turns, but it's a good representation of what lengths some people go to in order to give name, form and a certain desire to their sometimes shameful differences.

[DKT]

And did anyone have thoughts that, since this IS a red riding hood kidlet story and the blacksmith "killed" the wolf who took her innocence, that the MC could be actually the blacksmith's SON. Especially if he had wolfy blood in him already.

Wait, are you talking about what happened in this story, or what happened prior to this story? I was under the impression that the woodcutter was the one who killed the Wolf in the fairy tale.

I enjoyed this story well enough. I'm surprised by a couple of spikes in the thread: 1) that is was horror (heh, try running this over at PP and the thread there would say, nice, but it's a Podcastle story) and 2) that the writing was poor.  I thought N.K. Jemison prose was fantastic.  She's had some excellent EP stories, and I'm looking forward to checking out her book. 

That said, although I thought the story was written well enough the way it ended with him going into the villiage to eat human flesh left...a bad taste in my mouth.  (I don't know. I thought they'd taste like chicken.)  It just broke a lot of my sympathy for the character.

Fantastic reading again by Rajan Khanna, though.  And all in all, I'm glad I listened to this one.  I hope we hear more from both N.K. Jemison and Khanna.

[Talia]

Yeah, I'm not exactly sure what I made of the story, but I would definitely say the writing was solid. The complaints of people saying its poorly written I suspect are largely spurred by people being uncomfortable with it and mistaking the reason why they're unhappy as the writing style rather than the rather unsavory subject matter.

[Loz]

By the cusp of manhood — that age when worthier lads began to consider a trade and marriage — Anrin had become a youth of fortitude and peculiar innocence.

So let's stop tossing the word 'paedophilia' around please? Thanks.

I really enjoyed this story, though for a while I thought the wolf was Anrin's father (which would have made it incestuous gay furry action) until I remembered that the wolf got killed at the end of the story. I'm curious as to whether this would be considered to be following on from what might be considered the 'generic' Little Red Riding Hood story (with the Big Bad Wolf's rape of Red not directly mentioned) or whether the author would think it was something more along the lines of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie's Lost Girls, with the story being a cover-story created to deal with an incident of werewolf/human sex?

[MiraCheskis]

Anyway, kudos to the author for stepping outside and having some gay leads.  I love my podcast community and the fantasy stories I've found out there and this is the first one (that I've found) to feature a gay themed story.

Seconded!  Except I also follow Metamor City, which has all sorts of interesting stuff.

I'm itching for a fantasy or science fiction story where the protagonist just happens to be gay, where it's not the central theme of the story.  I'm itching for a movie with that too, but that'll take a while.

[Rachel Swirsky]

Mira -- check out Matt Ruff's Set This House in Order. It's not quite what you're saying, but I think you'll be pleasantly surprised.

[jamesperez14]

I have to say that my comments come somtime after the story was released on Podcastle, and like many others are not good, but are not meant to attack or berate only a criticism.  Kudos do belong to the author for putting her work out there, for her willingness to work at something and give it up to the public for enjoyment or critique. Obviously she worked hard on the story and deserves the credit; I do not or will not take that away.  But having said all of that, here are my comments directed to the subject and depiction of the story.

While the story was a bit obtuse it did have a measured flow.  The characterization of a late teen boy in the era depicted was not clearly defined even if a reference was made of occupation; this is due to his naivety and his all to child like curiosity of what changes he himself was to experience in life.  It was all too much, rather than the homoerotic nature of the piece being subtle and then building it was like a bad skit with nothing but stereotypes.  I don’t think it would have mattered if the main character was a boy or girl; the blacksmith would have still been portrayed as a black chaps wearing village person or the lecherous old man offering a candy bar in the park. 

I will stop there and say the author needs to keep working hard and know that some will like the stories and some wont’, it really doesn’t matter what the group as a whole thinks, it's whether or not it reaches the audience that he or she is trying to reach.  Keep up the hard work!

[Zathras]

DID NOT LIKE. 

I don't care what the justifications were, this stank of child porn.  Casually throw in his age somewhere to clear it up.  What age did boys "start to think about their trades"?  At what age did they become apprentices?

I will go back and finish reading all the comments now.  I stopped after the author's first post.

[Zathras]

Read all the comments.  I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, but I am damn well gonna speak mine.

I will have to expand my vocabulary.  I figured slash would mean gore, as in the slasher flicks I would watch as a teenager.

I stand by my statement that this stinks of chld porn.  Whether it is or not, I'm sure that pedophiles will love it.