December 20th, 2006
by
Liz Henry
Last Friday my rpg group finished a 10-game session of a game set in Zelazny’s Amber, “Shadow of a Doubt“, using the now out of print Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. It was my second time playing in the Amber system and universe with GM Madeline (z-amber) and all the players had a blast. The moral complexities and ambiguities of Zelazny’s world were brought out beautifully. Madeline’s descriptions of action, her fluid and distinct characterizations of the Amber royal family members, her inventive spontaneous plot twists, and her ability to mindfuck us as players — all added to the game’s depth and style.
There were Nazis in our homeland of Occupied Britain. There were horrible Cthuloid things. There was President Eleanor Roosevelt. There was personal angst and court intrigue. And there was ass-kicking galore!
When an intense rpg ends, I miss it like the feeling of sadness of finishing a great book. So I picked up Zelazny’s “Nine Princes in Amber” and gave it a late-night bathtub read. Ye gods… or Ye Patterns and Logruses and unicorns. It was so much more annoying than I remembered! It fits the genre of hard boiled detective fiction, but need it fit quite so well by making every woman dumb or a sexpot or a schemer or a dumb, scheming sexpot? Or dead? Or all of those things?
I read about 5 more of them anyway because I was very stressed and in that mental space where I needed something that wasn’t great literature, or poetry, or heavy history or feminist theory. I read Nine Princes in Amber, and then had to skip to the second series because that’s what I had in the house: The Courts of Chaos, The Trumps of Doom, Blood of Amber, and Sign of Chaos.
This is getting embarrassing, but it’s blogging, so that’s okay.
By the middle of the second book I was just looking for a woman who was described like a human being and not a sex object. Who doesn’t act as a person whose main thing going for her is her ability to jack men around with sexual attraction because that’s her only option in the hideous patriarchal dystopia that is the Amber universe. Maybe even one who was competent and who didn’t die. I didn’t find that woman.
For a minute I was fond of Jasra, though she fits in “schemer” and is also set up as a sort of poison fanged MILF. But still, at least she seemed to have a brain in her head. Then she got frozen stiff by a sorcerer and her face was painted like a clown face and someone put tassels on her nipples. Yes, really! And our hero (at this point, Merlin) grabs her, “rescues” her to use her as a hostage, and then hangs his cloak on her.
I know there’s been discussion of this before, but I am looking at the very strange dissonance between the irksome sexism of the source texts and the amazing stuff done with it in game adaptations. Amber Diceless has a much higher concentration of female rpg-ers than other games – at least that is my impression. In part this might be a critical mass effect of the culture at their many cons, and in part because the system is one that, early in the history of indy RPGs, built characters through a collective auctioning process. The auction process means that you build characters together through a process with several iterations, which I found very socially comfortable; defining my character off his relationships with the other characters. I do wonder though: is there anything inherent in the world building of Amber that gives it some feminist possiblities despite the actual story’s sexism? I wonder if the infinite-Shadows multiple universe setup makes it feel more possible that a different history, a different society, could exist?
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
- More blogging by
Liz Henry at
http://liz-henry.blogspot.com
Previous:
wiki project on theory --- Next:
Submit Your Programming Ideas for WisCon 31
Filed under Books & Literature, Cons & Community, Gaming | Comments (10)
I don’t think you’re being completely fair to Zelazny here.
I think Amber’s internal politics are a stylised and exaggerated version of renaissance politics. The female characters spend their time jacking men because that’s what Amber characters do, regardless of their sex. If anything, Zelazny’s progressive because he allows for female characters who are willing to get their hands dirty rather than just sit back and pull the strings. Zelazny’s females are by and large the equals of their brothers and cousins. The only point at which he drops the ball is that none of the females explicitly go after the throne, preferring instead to compete for a regency.
You’re also forgetting Vialle, Random’s wife who is definitely neither a back-stabber nor a bimbo (even if she’s drawn to look like Princess Diana in one of the RPG books).
The amber books are heterocentrist and you really have to start reading between the lines to find any trace of a non-white character but I don’t think sexism is a fair charge. Especially when you consider the timeframe within which Zelazny wrote those books.
Yes. Yes, sexism is a fair charge. It’s more than fair. Sorry, Jonathan, but I can’t read Amber either for that reason.
Yes, everybody in Amber screws everybody else over; that’s the milieu. It’s not the fact of that, it’s the HOW. As Liz points out, the men do it one way, the women another — and the women do it in tired old cliched ways that are so sexist that I would even call them misogyny.
Vialle just highlights the whole virgin/whore thing Zelazny’s got going. As for Deirdre, she’s got potential — but she vanishes! Presumably because Zelazny couldn’t cope with a woman with agency.
The books are dreadful. As for the RPG, it was the first “diceless,” which is I think part of its longevity and popularity. The ability to frame various kinds of social conflict (as well as hack-n-slash) is another plus for it, as is its easy motion between (game and literary) genres. And the Elders can be recharacterized as need be to fit the group, though I’d be interested to see a study of what gets abstracted away in the typical game, and what are considered to be “core” traits among Amber players.
I don’t play Amber myself, not because of the sexism (which is much attenuated in the Amber circles I am on the edge of) but because the whole “I am a demigodlet, I screw around with history and people’s lives and technology and magic JUST BECAUSE I CAN, and because nobody but us demigodlets is actually important. Responsibility? Noblesse oblige? What’s that?” feels pretty repellent to me.
Well, I’ll have to re-read these books, which I read more than 20 years ago – before some of the later ones were even published. I do recall them being very boy-centered, and in particular on the father-son relationship. At the time, I thought they were fun, but at the time I only noticed sexism when it forced me to wear a dress and shave my legs.
I don’t think there’s a virgin/whore thing because the women do fill different roles.
You’ve got Florimel who is admittedly your standard brainless bimbo.
You’ve got Fiona who is the archetypal high-medieval schemer, manipulating guys left, right and center.
You’ve got Vialle the supportive, wise spouse.
You’ve got Deirdre the physical warrior type.
This is more spice girl-style characterisation than the standard madonna/whore dichotomy.
Meanwhile, over in penis-town ALL the men are scheming sociopaths who think nothing of putting whole universes to the sword for their own personal gain.
You if you wanted to argue that A) Zelazny’s not great at characterisation and B) the Amberites are all pretty shitty people then I’d be fully behind you but I think levelling the charge of sexism at Zelazny constitutes watering the term down to dangerous levels.
I don’t know… you might be right but I don’t think you’ve backed up the claim yet.
Thank you for the sweet words!
I think you’re right that the ADRPG has more female gamers than other games (though I hear Vampire is high, too, which I find curious).
“is there anything inherent in the world building of Amber that gives it some feminist possiblities despite the actual story’s sexism?”
I think there is. Now, the sexism of the books has been discussed a lot, like you note. Zelazny is one of those authors, like Vernor Vinge, who has one story that shows up in nearly everything he writes. Zelazny’s story is: there’s a very competent immortal guy who’s kindof a dick, and he cares about a woman who betrays him because she cares about some cause more than she cares about him, and then he saves the world anyway.
I actually like Zelazny’s story, from a feminist point of view even. He always has at least one competent female character who has a life of her own regardless of the male protagonist. The reason I mentioned Vinge was that I’ve been thinking a lot about his basic story recently, and it pretty much always involves a supposedly competent female being tricked by the big evil dude who only the male protagonist sees through… That’s a lot more irritating, to me.
Now, the second series of Amber books, the Merlin series, is widely regarded among Amber gamers as bad, and it’s generally ignored. This is partly because it adds a bunch of whackass magical/metaphysical stuff that screws up any game it touches… But you’ve helped me figure out one of the reasons I don’t think much of it. Zelazny gets away from his basic story, and instead a lot of the focus is on, “there’s this competent kinda dickish immortal guy, and everyone is begging after him, but he doesn’t want to do anything about it.” I mean, that sorta worked in To Die in Italbar, but in general it’s a really hard plot to bring off well. The problem is, as you point out, that there’s no need to make the fawners capable antagonists.
Also, the sexism there was kindof a letdown. In the first series, Fiona is a fulcrum of the changing of the world. In the second, she fetches and carries for some punk protagonist for no real reason, and then gets in a catfight with someone who stole a man from her. God.
For my thoughts on the reason Amber attracted so many women, I’m going to lay a lot of it on the design of the game. For one, female characters are physically exactly as scary as male characters. In the rulebook, the character first in Strength is female, and the examples in the “various ways to run a combat” section are her character versus a gorilla or something.
A major factor is that Amber Diceless was a completely new thing when it came out in 1991–which meant that the built-up crowd of male gamers didn’t have quite their usual authority. My impression of 70s and 80s gaming was that it involved endless contradicting dinky rules, and whoever got in on the ground floor could reign like a god, optimizing their character and bringing up useful forgotten rules at will… Not a welcoming environment. Whereas the ADRPG has hardly any rules to retreat to, and often relies on negotiation, a common skill among cool people.
(Well, of course I like the system, I run it, don’t I? ;) )
Right, and eventually I’m getting around to setting: like I said, the female characters in Zelazny’s version of noir don’t seem that bad to me. Moreover, he makes it pretty clear that Corwin is wrong about all sorts of stuff… From the “Random is my full brother” comment that resulted from the author’s still-fluxing world, to the written-into-the-gaps way it’s clear that Deirdre isn’t the greatful damsel Corwin expects her to be. So it’s easy to throw out anything you don’t like about the world of Amber… “Corwin could be lying” has been used to explain so much it has it’s own jargon on the Amber Mailing List.
And, yeah, the infinite worlds help. It’s pretty cool to think that no fellow player can say, “But that’s silly!” Bah! Shadow is infinite, and in my Shadow, only females can ride the scaled flying kirin!
See, this is what I think is so interesting about assessing characterization & plot. IMO there is no such thing as the perfect non-sexist characterization. Every characterization is “of its time” (to hearken back to Ide’s earlier discussion –meaning that is written by people from and in a particular social setting, and consumed by people from and in a particular time and place. Assessing characterization as “sexist” is a critique of the way characterization operates in certain times and places. It fundamentally ties into audience expectations–which shift depending on individual and even individual readings. Zelazny can be simultaneously “feminist” and “sexist” in his characterizations. Too often people try to argue about the objective reality of whether a text “is” sexist or not, which, to my mind, is pointless. The question is in what ways is this text sexist or not sexist.
Or at least that’s what I’m thinking right now. I fear a bit of deconstructionism is creeping in.
I’ve never been able to read much of those Amber books because of the tone and the snerk-snerk-jerkism of the “paints a clown face on her, hangs tassels on her breasts, and then ha ha someone else hangs a cloak on her” type parts. For much the same reasons, I can’t read those DeCamp and Pratt books. Honestly, I’d rather have a book without strong women characters and also without the endless smirking and/or endless smirking hatred towards women, if I absolutely had to choose.
To make random, unjustified generalizations, I think of this tone of writing as something generally produced by male writers who got their start in the fifties or sixties….a kind of freedom to talk about sex, a willingness to find active women sexy, and absolutely no interest in women except as they are sexy to the author personally. Also, underneath, a lot of resentment of women who don’t cooperate by being either sexy/compliant or invisible.
It’s fascinating to read about this RPG stuff, too. (I was not allowed role-playing games as a child…my parents believed (and yes, they did indeed believe this) that RPGs led to delusions and mental breakdown.
A bit more about “Knight of Shadows”. I’m still in the middle. There was a halfway interesting character, Coral, who walks the Pattern ready for adventure and then tells it to take her anywhere. Did I mention that it transports her to imprisonment and trance? And then what’s his face has to rescue her and … has sex with her in the middle of the Pattern while she is knocked out. I mean, Merlin rapes Coral (his great-aunt) while she’s on mystical roofies. It’s okay, because the Pattern made him do it. And she sort of murmers her asset while still passed out. All with the sort of irritating nudge nudge wink wink appeal of Piers Anthony making sly Xanthian comments about seeing some teenage girl’s panties. Lord, how nauseating… I was kind of enjoying the series up till the clown face, but now the magic date rape has completely crossed the line for me!
She was strong, cool, smart, prepared. She was wearing pants. She walked the Pattern and the multiverse was her oyster. What does she get? Imprisoned and knocked out for a book and a half, and then, fucked. And she was happy about it.
Really it makes me embarrassed for Zelazny, it’s like he’s been going around all his life with a big green booger hanging out of his nose. Except about a million million times worse. And people make fun of Mary Sues?
***
Oh – and now at the end, Coral and Merlin’s exgirlfriend fight over marrying him and then stab him with forks and try to eat him.
I read the first five Amber books: really enjoyed the first (I love amnesia novels) and went on more or less on the impetus from the first one. None of them are that long, after all. But when it dawned on me he’d written another five books, I just gave up on it. Not worth the calories, so to speak.
Never could get into RPG. When it’s good, I wish it was a book: when it’s bad, it’s like being trapped reading a very, very dull book.
[...] Adrienne Traxler of Femist SF – The Blog! discusses the difference between the sexism of Zelazny’s Amber books, and the positive experience of RPG gaming based off that source, and Adrienne of Simadrienne talks about the an excuse given for sexism in gaming, namely that it’s “historical.” [...]