Race, Gender, Sexuality, Violence, and the Media

There are posters from this anti-rape campaign all over campus.  It's a great idea, but as often happens, they got so wrapped up in one cause that they damage another.  Observe:  every single couple is color-coordinated - even the white people are divided into the blond couple and the brunette couple - except the gays. 

They are also the only pair where one isn't looking at the other or resting her head trustingly on his shoulder.  Maybe it is because in all the heterosexual posters, it is the girl (victim) looking at the boy, and they did not want to say which gay was being (not) raped.  Still, they could gaze adoringly at each other?  Or at least smile, or put their arms around each other?  Instead of standing awkwardly with their shoulders squished together, glaring at the camera.  Maybe they're holding hands?  I can't tell.  It may or may not have been intentional, but the way the background looks, there seems to be a line running between them, separating them.  Most of the other couples are entwined in some way, making such a view impossible.  While I appreciate the homosexual inclusion, I feel it could have been a bit more inclusive.

So what are these posters really saying?  1.  People can't date outside of their color scheme.  2.  Gays can't date within their color scheme because then you can't tell if they're gay, they might be brothers or just friends or something.  Oh, and 3. Women don't rape.  Granted, I can see where there might be difficulties, but it is certainly not impossible for a woman to rape a man or a woman.  After all, it isn't always a brutal holding down by force - hence the poster campaign.  There's date rape, coercion, drugs, alcohol, etc.

Obviously, chicks dig guys who don't rape.  You can tell by the way she is gazing adoringly up at you.  Guy, you want this hot chick to be clinging to you like this?  Don't rape her, and don't look at her.  The women are trophialized. 

Except in one of the African-American couples towards the bottom, where she is staring at the camera with a little smile as if to say "Yeah.  My boyrfriend's awesome.  He asks.  Girls, you don't have to put up with a guy who doesn't ask."


I get that the posters are trying to pander to the lowest common denominator, hence the "Guys who don't rape get chicks hanging off them."  This, however, promotes trophialization, a word I just made up.  For a definition, watch a chick flick.  Then watch a dude flick.  There's a romantic subplot in the dude flick too, isn't there?  But she doesn't really do anything except have sex with the guy once he saves the day.  In the chick flick, even if it is about something else, the relationship with the guy is a larger subplot.  I just saw the film "Morning Glory" which was not too bad overall but the plot could have been interpreted as "A girl has to choose between her career and her boyfriend."  Guys don't have to choose.  They just get women as prizes.

Going back to race, I can admit there would be problems with an interracial straight couple as well.  Of course the woman is the darker-skinned minority dating a white guy!  Or:  Of course it is the darker-skinned minority preying on the white female.  Or:  Of course the minorities date each other.  So with the gays, it's on equal footing and they are not sexualizing a minority by showing it as the female (that seems like another unfortunate implication right there).  Solution?  Avoid tokenism.  There are three African-Americans, two caucasions, one latino (and considering the posters are also available in Spanish, you'd think there would be more), one gay/interracial, and one Asian (and personally, I think she has the most sickeing facial expression; it's like she's sniffing him).


I also get that there is a target audience of racial minorities, but what about interracial minorities?  Gays?  Especially gays, because they are much less likely to report it - you would have to out yourself twice shamefully, once as homosexual and once as a victim (not saying straight guys can't get raped, but it's more likely to be date rape for anyone).  However, by including an interracial gay couple, they get two minorities for the price of one!

You may think I am missing the point of this entire campaign, and the truth is that I think it is awesome rhetoric to tell guys that sticking their dick in something doesn't make them cooler and that being a gentlemen is manly and sexy.  But like I said at the beginning, they got so focused on their cause they ignored unfortunate implications - and racism is no longer built of laws and institutions, but implications.  Tread carefully, my friends.

"Frostfire" - by Kai Meyer, Chapter 3 (Part 6/7)

(Not that this has anything to do with Valentine's Day.  There's snow, but that's about it.)

            Step by step.  Agonizingly slow.

            The cold would do her in, if she did not walk faster.  She knew that every night people froze on the streets of St. Petersburg.  People without money, without a place to stay.  She, on the other hand, had an entire hotel for herself.  If not for this wall that separated her from it.  And the endless distance to the front entrance.

            She would not make it.  Never.  With every step that she overcame, another one seemed to be added underneath her.  An endless descent into the pitch-black Nowhere.

            She did not even feel hatred for Maxim and the others.  In her was only panic.  All-consuming panic and cold.

            And then she arrived at the bottom.  The tips of her feet tested for the edge of another step, but the next one was sunk deep in the snow.  She had reached level ground, the surface of the mass of snow that covered all of St. Petersburg.

            She sank in, but not especially deep:  She was too light.  She stumbled over the hem of the coat, let out a sob as she fell against the wall of the hotel, and yet somehow kept herself on her feet.  If she fell now, she would not get up.  The emptiness above would press her down into the snow, like the boot of a giant.

            Onward!  Go onward!

            She pushed herself along with her back to the wall.  The wall gave her a bit of support and kept the outside world far away at least in one direction.  That way she did not feel so entirely unprotected.

            It was cruel torture to battle her way to the next corner.  The narrow swath led into a wider alley.  If the fire escape was found on the back side of the Aurora, then this had to be the side wall. From here, the way along it to the Nevsky Prospect and the main entrance seemed to Mouse to be as endless as if someone had demanded for her to walk to Siberia on foot.

            Hopeless, whispered a voice inside her.  You won’t make it.  You’ll die.  Better to just lie here in the snow. Freezing doesn’t hurt, Kukushka had said; you simply go to sleep.

            She did not give up.  Not yet.

            Behind driving curtains of snow she saw a distant shimmer of light:  the end of the alley, the shine of the gas lanterns on the Nevsky Prospect.

            The soft snow under her feet and the much too long coat hindered her.  With her back against the wall, both hands with fingers spread out on the stone, she pushed herself sideways.  She kept her eyes closed now, to block out the Outside World.  The cold ate at her like fire.

            In the blackness behind her eyelids emerged a picture, like a painting, that drifted up to the surface of the dark ocean depths.  A sharp-edged outline.  Towers and battlements that thrust like knives into the raging sky of snow, high up on a harsh rocky cliff.

            Mouse tore her eyes open.  The vision faded away.  Dream snow became real.  The light had come closer, but she felt that her steps kept growing heavier.  Would someone punish Maxim and the others, if she froze out here?  Unlikely.  No one would blame them.  She was, after all, only the Girl-Boy, easier to replace than a broken window pane.

(Translation note of the day:  There is a word in German, "weiter," that can be translated as wide, far, another, or high/stoned.  I definitely got it mixed up in my first draft before I caught myself.  Still, it's hard to decide whether a path is leading to a "distant alley" or a "wider alley" or "one more alley."  Headache.)

What Was I Thinking?

Hello Hello!  I'm still here.  I don't know if you are, though.  Ah well.  I don't take blogging seriously, like some people I've met.  I believe I'm going to consider this my training blog, so that when I'm a published writer and people actually care what I have to say, then I'll know how to say things worth saying.

Blah blah blah aside, I'm doing better and worse on the writing front.  Worse, because I haven't written anything of significance in...well, I'm not even sure.  Since I decided to finally put that nameless Baleful Polymorph that I'd been working on since high school out of its misery and be DONE WITH IT FOR REAL THIS TIME.  I am now free to work on my multitude of side stories that are all so much more interesting! 

...

...

You know, despite being a hideous monster with a broken plot that had gone through so many versions it didn't even know what it was anymore...I don't really feel the same sort of dedication for anything else.  Maybe it was just my age, and now I realize it was crap, I'm hard pressed to come up with something new that isn't.  At this point I'm tempted to take it out of storage, dust off the pieces, and see if there's anything I can stitch together.  But I can't.  It's dead.  As it should be and it's time to move on.

I did say I was doing better, though, and here's why:  I'm taking Creative Writing.  Yep.  I displaced some poor Creative Writing major who won't be able to take any actual CW classes for another semester.  Eh.  They have so many generals and literature components they won't really fall behind.  It seems that a lot of the people in that class aren't CW majors either, so it's a nice laid-back atmosphere for me to finally rid myself of this damn phobia.

For those who haven't been following, I have an absolute terror of sharing my writing with other people - what I like to term "page fright."  What I noticed the first time I had to read a poem in that class, however, is that it was mostly physiological.  I was twitchy and tense and kept fidgeting with a yo-yo while I took deep breaths and tried to keep my vision from blurring.  You know, like I was on the verge of a panic attack.  Only I wasn't actually scared.  It was weird.  And they liked my poem.  Better than some of the others.  A lot of the others.  I'm not going to say there are some bad writers in that class, but some are better than others.

So I think I'll be able to kick this habit, since it seems to be a Pavlovian reflex more than an emotional response.  Problems:  It's exhausting.  Writing a poem every week. Reading twenty poems a week.  What was I thinking?  I'm a prose writer.  I'm sick of poetry, and we're not even halfway through the poetry unit.  There's only one short story required for the class, and  - best part - the professor will not accept fantasy. 

Now, if his rationale had been that traditional High Fantasy requires a great deal of worldbuilding that does not work well in short works - okay.  I can accept that.  But no, he just doesn't like fantasy because he thinks it's crap.  This guy, by the way, writes crime fiction.  Murder mystery detective stories.  Room to judge?  I don't think so.  He also refuses trashy paranormal romance - but you know that several girls are going to write trashy mundane romances anyway.

 Does it matter if a stupid girl is in love with a stupid angsty hipster or a stupid angsty vampire?  At least if there's a vampire, you know that someone's going to bleed eventually.  And you know, just bcause a story is a paranormal romance does not mean it has to be trashy - people just write with that assumption.  The thing is, there are some good mundane stories about lovers - The Time-Traveller's Wife, The Gargoyle - okay, I lied when I said mundane.  But this just proves the point I was going to make anyway!  Fantastical elements do not automatically make a story crap!  It is how you use them that determines the quality of your story.

Better stop now, I'm rambling.  I shall return anon!

The Plague Episode

Have you noticed in series that are longer than trilogies, the authors seemed stumped for that many sub-villains and minor conflicts and will throw in a plague, just to change things up?  Generally of a magical cause, and the hero traipses about the countryside some more until he finds the cure, and everything's fine by the time the next book rolls around.  Unless there has been a token death in the party.  Surprisingly, this is not a trope - there is a "Plague," a "Mystical Plague," and a "Find the Cure," but none are quite what I am talking about here in terms of the episode.

As anyone who has read Albert Camus' The Plague or has a decent knowledge of history (or even current events) is well aware, plagues...don't exactly work like that.  People get sick.  And they go to the resident witch-doctors, who are stumped, but do the best they can.  More people get sick.  The town goes into quarantine.  Fear.  Boredom.  More fear.  More boredom.  Unless you're actually a doctor, but even then finding treatments, cures, and vaccines is really tricky even with modern medical technology.

There is no magical cure, because there is no magical cause. That does not stop people from trying.  The Jews got blamed for the Black Death in Europe - partly because they were the only people washing their hands and so weren't getting sick right away.  This led to lynchings and hate crimes.  After all, what is a hate crime but fear+boredom?  Nothing like a crisis to fuel xenophobia.

The miracle cure is pure wish-fulfillment; sickness is an enemy we cannot fight, and we humans don't deal well with helplessness.  Even in modern western society, we have flus and cancers - we can take preventative measures, but sometimes not even that is enough.  Illness is something universal that has a profound impact on the human psyche - and yet much of modern fantasy literature boils it down to a cure-Macguffin.  This happens in part because the plague is a single episode, not the story in itself as Camus made it.  It lessens the impact.

Dear fantasy writers, if you are going to write a plague story, read Camus and not any of the following.  While Novik is a historian-goddess and has probably read Camus and more, I am still approaching the fourth Temeraire book with caution, as it seems to be that series' plague-episode, and this is usually what Plague Episodes look like:

Plague Episodes in Fantasy Literature:

Temple of the Winds (Sword of Truth book 4) by Terry Goodkind – a witch releases a magical plague from a box to mess with the hero.  The hero and his girlfriend are forced to marry other people in order to cure the plague.  It doesn’t really make sense in context.  The hero gets the plague in the end, but he gets better.  One of the token lesbians dies.

Briar’s Book (Circle of Magic book 4) by Tamora Pierce – a careless witch dumps some magical toxic waste in the sewers, starting a plague. Luckily, the plucky kids notice things that lead the cleverer adults to a cure.  They’re healer-mages, so it works.  A friend of the main character who only appears in that book dies.  The main character mentor gets sick, but he calls her back from the edge of death.  It’s a kid’s book.  Curiously, this breaks my aforementioned pattern by being the last book in the quartet, but the stories are self-contained and switch viewpoint character for each.  Also interesting that there seem to be a lot of book fours.  "Four" is a homonym with "Death" in Chinese.

Gregor and the Curse of the Warmbloods (Underland Chronicles book 3) by Suzanne Collins – yes, that Suzanne Collins.  Gregor and his companions go on a quest to find a plague, then find out someone dropped a test tube in a lab where the “good guys” were designing a bioweapon.  Gregor’s bat and mother get sick, but neither die (it is Suzanne Collins though; it’s just that she saves the heartbreaking death for the last book).  No named characters die of the plague that I recall.

The Lost City of Faar (Pendragon book 2) by D.J. Machale – turns out to actually be a mass poisoning by the villain intending to start a war.  Only book two so plot is still formulaic.  Secondary character’s parents die, but he’s supposed to be an orphan because of his destiny, so they would have vanished somehow anyway.

The Keep of Fire (The Last Rune book 2) by Mark Anthony – a plague that causes people to burst into flames is affecting both worlds.  Hero and companions travel to title location and send the radioactive magical rock that is causing the plague into space, thus ending the plague.  It makes sense in context.  Main character’s bestie in our world dies, which is sad.  Other plot-relevant people get sick and die.

Lady Friday (Keys to the Kingdom book 6) by Garth Nix – embarassingly enough, I don’t really remember.  I think the title character was causing the Sleepy Plague, and once she was defeated…there was an extra step in there.  It didn’t just go away.  Main character’s friend got sick, but got better and rallied the defense in our world and took care of the plague victims.

Salamandastron (Redwall) by Brian Jacques – the inhabitants of Redwall abbey get sick with a mysterious illness, and Thrugg the otter journeys to a mythical mountain to find a mythical flower guarded by a mythical eagle which is the only cure.  He finds it of course, and the eagle is nice enough to fly it back for him.  It’s Redwall, so there is some token death, though the token death occurs in a different subplot.

Warriors by Erin Hunter – a recurring subplot where it is actually done well.  Cats get sick.  Sometimes a lot at the same time.  Sometimes they die.  Sometimes there are herbs.  Sometimes the herbs are not enough.  No questing for a special cure to a special illness.

Swordspoint by Ellen Kushner – as a joke when people would ask her “What happened next?” she would say “Oh, the next year there was a diphtheria outbreak and they all died.”  Which, in a pre-industrial pseudo-medieval society, is not entirely unlikely.  Though she did eventually write a sequel that was devoid of a diphtheria outbreak.

"Frostfire" by Kai Meyer, Chapter 3 Part 5/7

            She still had the faint hope that the prank had lasted long enough.  That the door would swing open again at any moment.  That someone would pull her back into the warmth, indoors, and chase her down the halls amid peals of laughter.  But the door stayed shut.

            And Mouse was alone in the open.

            She stood there and shivered, though the cold was only partly to blame for that.  It seemed like someone was tightening a strap around her chest, she could hardly breathe.  Her stomach wanted to turn inside out.  Everything about her trembled and shook, her voice failed her.  The tears froze on her cheeks, were thawed by ones flowing after, and solidified anew.

            It was so dark that she could only with difficulty make out the top step of the iron stairwell.  But in any case, it was unthinkable for her to set foot on it.  She could not.  The emptiness of the outside world hardened around her like a resin, held her fast, let her stiffen into motionlessness.  Her muscles cramped and refused to obey her.

            She did not know how long she stood there like that.

            As she finally overcame her paralysis, and very, very carefully placed a foot on the top step, it was as though she had to break through an icy armor that had laid itself around her body.  She stood standing once again, grabbed hold of the coat and pulled it on.  It was much too big, a garment for a grown-up.  The hem dragged on the ground, and her hands disappeared deep in the dangling sleeves.

            Her movements were so shaky that she nearly slipped and fell.  Again she had to hold fast to the icy railing, and even through the cloth of the coat, the cold was gruesome.  She had spent her whole life in the heated rooms of the hotel. Only now did it become clear to her that she had not known at all what true cold meant.

            Her gaze searched the sky, but there, too, was only blackness and millions of damp-heavy snowflakes that fell noiselessly to the ground.  Down looked like up to her, everything dark, everything empty, everything frighteningly wide and boundless.

            Her eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom, and now she saw that the stairs were situated in a narrow alley.  A brick wall rose into the sky right across from the back wall of the hotel, high up to God knew where.

            With her back to the wall, she began her descent.  One step after the other.  Not even the terrible cold could bring her to go faster.  She had greater and greater difficulty drawing breath.  The panic nested in her ribcage, threw out tentacles that laid themselves over her muscles and imposed their own motions, like the threads of a puppeteer’s marionette.

            Stumbling, she moved down the stairway into the depths.  Four stories could be an endless abyss, when they led through ice cold darkness with snow driving about.  But it was neither the blackness nor the height that affected Mouse so.  It was the awareness of being outside.  In the open.  She had often spoken with Kukushka about her fear of the outside world, but not even he knew an explanation for it.  Something in my head, she had thought then.  Now, though, now that it was so wide, she thought no more.  In her mind was only emptiness, just like the sky above her.

Tardis Legwarmers!

For Christmas this year I decided to crochet a pair of legwarmers patterned like a TARDIS for my friend who loves Dr. Who.  I was able to find several patterns for plushie TARDISes, knitted socks, a hat, even a David Tenant - but no crochet legwarmers.

I have never made legwarmers before, nor have I designed a pattern, so please forgive the flaws.  For instance, I assumed that legwarmers were supposed to be worked in the round, but then I actually looked at legwarmer patterns and found that most of them weren't.  Oh well.  One day I might go back and try to fix this, but for now, here it is:

TARDIS Legwarmers

I used a size H hook, Wool-Ease blue, Caron black, and TLC white.  Kind of a hodgepodge, I know.

Also, the friend I made them for has a very slight build, so you may want to scale up.  They are, unfortunately, not bigger on the inside than on the outside.

With blue, chain 36.

Row 1-5:  Sc around in the back loop of each st (all stitches are worked into the back loop unless otherwise specified.

Row 6-8:  Change to black.  Sc around in back loop.

Row 9:  Change back to blue.  Sc around.

Row 10-11:  Blue, white, white, blue. 

I'd also never changed color mid-row before, and there are probably tutorials online somewhere, but after quite a bit of trial and error I came up with:  With blue, pull up a loop.  With white, pull yarn through both loops.  Sc completed.  Sc white.  Pull up a loop, change to blue.  With blue, pull yarn through both loops.  Repeat around for 2 rows.

Row 12:  With blue, sc around

Row 13-14:  Repeat rows 10 & 11.

Row 15:  With blue, *5 sc, 1 dc (in front loop).  Repeat from * around.

Row 16-18:  Repeat row 15, adding one more white box one more white box, 3x3.

Row 19:  Repeat row 15.

Row 20:  *5sc in front loop, 1 dc in front loop.  Repeat from * around.

Repeat rows 15-20 three more times, skipping the white box.

Sc in back loops 3x around.  Of course I haven't lost count of the rows.  You can do math yourself, can't you?

Embroider "POLICE BOX" in white on the black stripe.

Now make another.

Congratulations!  You can now show off your Dr. Who fanaticism while keeping your legs nice and toasty.

I will try to link this to my Ravelry account (where I am known as "Haekelerin" - yes I know very original) as soon as I figure out how.

If you find any problems with the pattern just leave them in the comments.

(Top) Five Books About Griffins

Why am I doing all these lists?  Because I'm bored!  And I read too much!  And I've been watching a lot of Nostalgia Chick videos!  And because I can!  And because I just finished a griffin book.

I like griffins.  You may have guessed from the title of this blog, even though it is a word I got form watching a spelling bee years ago and apparently means messy handwriting and has nothing to do with griffins.  The thing is that griffins are way underdone, especially compared to, say, dragons, or wolves.  So instead of being a "Top" Five, this is really just a list of the five books about griffins that I've read and ranked.

5.  The Griffin Mage Trilogy - Rachel Neumeier

This one I only read a couple years ago, but I had to do a library search by "griffins" because I could remember neither title nor author, nor the names of any of the characters, nor exactly what happens.  I only read the first book, Lord of the Burning Sands. So let's see.  There's this girl, who's an orphan, and lives on a horse ranch (points for not making it a generic farm) and then a bunch of griffins swoop in and make the area a desert because they have some kind of Grogromon effect on the environment.  And then they kidnap the girl because she has some special magic.  And...stuff happens, and there's a big fight at the end.  Oh, and there was some sub-plot with this soldier boy, and apparently certain humans have a kind of magic where they can control a particular type of animal, and the big twist at the end is when the soldier boy discovers he can control griffins.  Which makes them animals or what?  They seemed pretty sentient.

What I did not like about Neumeier's griffins is that she focused on making them savage and unhuman, which to me made them uninteresting. 

4.  The Fallen Moon Trilogy - K.J. Taylor

I was at the new bookstore, and I felt like I had to buy something, so when I saw The Dark Griffin  I was like "Hey!  I like griffins.  It can't be too bad."  And it wasn't.  More on that later.

My first big hurdle reading this was when I realized that people are riding these griffins.  They're  bond creatures.  But it is fairly integral to the plot, so I got over it.  And I mean, I had a griffin-rider fantasy when I was, like, twelve, so I can't really judge.  The prose isn't the best - it reads like a draft, but a draft by a rather good writer.  It's like in the original draft she wrote "And then the baby griffin grew up on its own" and by the final draft had to wrack her brains for details that really didn't matter to the plot overall.  And there there was the food.  Literally.  Her characters always eat "food."  As in:  "The food was plain but nourishing" or "His house had been ransacked, the food trampled into the floor."  Again, it seems that she put it in as a placeholder, and by the time she got to later drafts was like "Crap.  What do they eat instead of pizza and ramen?"  Her answer:  Bread.  Cheese.  Dried meat.  Apples.  Oh, and cabbage.  That was the one original item mentioned, only the thing is, you don't eat cabbage raw.  You have to cook it.  So what do they do with cabbage in...whatever the country was called?  Steam?  Boil?  Bake?  Fry?  Pickle?  Or do they eat it raw?  At one point the main character eats stew at an inn, and that's as excitingly detailed as it gets.  Read Redwall if you need inspiration, girl.

The only real problem I had with the book, though, was the characters.  They were so flat I could not tell that the one chick was the main character's actual established girlfried until they were having sex.  This was about three or four conversations in, and I had been wondering if they were a pre-couple.  There were so many times during the book I was practically shouting "Why are you doing that?  You have no motivation!  Real people don't talk like that!  Real people don't act like that!  Real people aren't motivated like that!"  Namely the part where the main characters friends all try to help him feel better after his griffin dies (oops, slight spoiler, but it's fairly early on).  And I'm thinking Dudes, his bond creature just died.  Some 'verses don't have people survive that, though that's usually the telepathic ones (points for no telepathy).  And the friends...you don't get any real sense of friendship.  The author was just "Hey, main character must have social life (insert friends here)"  None of them have a distinct personality and one can tell their only purpose is to be the failed support network.  They are characters playing a role, not people.  Also, more amusing than anything else - the one friend seems to be the only cop in town.  I mean, it's implied that it's kind of a bigger city, but every single time the cops show up, Bran is there.  Every.  Single.  Time.

I will give credit where credit is due, though, and say that the book has a very good plot.  As in I want to read the sequel even though the characters are flat as paper.  It's a Martinesque rather than a Tolkienesque story, meaning (I think; I'm just making this up and I've only read about three chapters of GRR Martin) that it is a human story with twisty political gimmicks, rather than a quest to destroy a Great Evil*.  The main character is sent to capture a wild griffin and told "Oh yeah, you'll be fine"  when really that sort of operation takes a specialized team, but he manages it even though his griffin partner dies.  And there's a mini-conspiracy against him, and this racism subplot that makes it really obvious the writer is white.  The second plotline follows the titiular dark griffin that he captured.  On the whole though, it's a really intriguing story despite the blandness of the chracters.  Plus there are references to Diana Wynne Jones, I swear there are.  The oranges.  The arena that is totally Costamaret.  You don't...?  Oh never mind, just keep reading.
(*Just read on author's website that it is supposed to be a villain origin story.  I am intrigued.  Library, y u no have sequels?!  I don't like it so much I want to spend more money on it.)

3.  The Black Griffin - Mercedes Lackey

Yes, I ranked a Mercedes Lackey book this high.  I actually kind of like this one.  Mostly because of the griffins.  This book is about...um...a sort of masseuse/psychotherapist/companion who hangs around an army camp in the middle of a war.   And so do a bunch of griffins.  Okay, they're fighting in the war, but I think the reason I actually like this book is because it is more character driven, rather than trying to destroy the Great Evil.  The war is there, but it is background to the story until the very end.  The other books in the trilogy are meh at best - the second book could show them rebuilding after the war, except by then everything's kind of rebuilt and Lackey has to introduce a new conflict from the Other Continent.  And the third book is a Disney sequel where the offspring of the main cast go off on adventures that are not nearly as interesting as the parents'.  But the first book is solid.

2.  The Firebringer Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce

Yeah, okay, the main focus in this series is on the unicorns, but the griffins are a major subplot, and there's one of the cover of the first book.  They are shown as enemies of the unicorns at first, but then they are shown to have their own culture and traditions, and eventually make peace when the unicorns decide to drive the wyverns out of their ancestral lands instead of squatting on the griffins' ancestral hunting grounds (really, the griffins were only hunting them because they drove out the deer.  It's all just a misunderstanding.).  Only it gets a little weird when the one griffin has a romancey relationship with one of the unicorns, and it's implied that they have offspring, which is like, wut?  I would kind of like to read something about that, though.  The offspring, that is.  Except it would end up being full of race-angst, so maybe it's better she left it at that.

1.  Dark Lord of Derkholm/Year of the Griffin - Diana Wynne Jones

Of course I rank Jones at the top.  Am I biased?  Only because she's a damn good writer.  Was, I mean.  Fuck.

Book 1 of the...duology...introduces Wizard Derk genetic engineering wizard, and his genetically engineered griffin offspring.  Plus the two human ones.  The rest of the plot is about how the pseudo-medieval fantasyland is being exploited for tours from a parallel world.  Wizard Derk is bullied into running the operations for a year, and his kids, griffin and human, all pitch in and help.  The second book is after the tours are abolished, and follows one of the griffin children at college dealing with the aftermath of the tours.  And yes, that makes it sound like a Disney sequel, except 1) Elda was around in the first book, she was just too young to do much, and 2)  Even though it is technically less epic, it is still quite interesting - perhaps even more interesting.  It's not a sequel, it's completely different, slightly related story.  I like these griffins (okay, they were my first impression of griffins) because they are people, not talking animals or mysterious "others."  Lackey actually managed to do that too.  Huh.  Whodathunk?

But I wanted another sequel, dammit!  I wanted to see Elda and Flury hook up!  That would have been so adorable!  And I wanted to see the Other Continent.  And now Jones is dead and there will be no more, ever!

Anyway, we have, in ascending order:  Griffins as Grogromon, Griffins as bond-creatures, Griffins as created race, Griffins as...other race, and Griffins as created race AND other race on the Other Continent.  Griffins as different magic-users from humans, griffins as the ONLY magic-users (I thought that was pretty cool, especially since the didn't spend a lot of time on exposition, just snuck it in there periodically), griffins as the same sort of magic-users as humans, griffins not exactly using magic any more than anyone else, and griffins as mostly the same sort of magic-users with cultural and personal variation.

Shortlist:  Squire by Tamora Pierce, in which there is a griffin on the cover and the main character takes care of a baby griffin for a while which does absolutely nothing to further the plot.  The griffins are just part of a magical ensemble and aren't really important.  And it's Tamora Pierce.

That's about all I had to say about griffins.  Or, well, books.  I realize I may very well be obligated now to read Game of Thrones if I'm going to be making claims like that the Tolkienist movement has now split into Eddingsian and Martinesque factions.  Or maybe I'll just stay with my indie-fantasy.

I like griffins.  I've had a griffin story on backburner for years.  Must write before they become the new dragons...do you think that could ever happen?  There's been a lot of indie dragon deconstructions lately, so they might be on their way out.

Hmm.