why I'm not reading Ody-C anymore

[snick_backup]

Okay, when I said I was going to explain why I ragequit, I apparently meant - like, right away.

This book is such a weird hot mess to me. I was intrigued because female-centric space adventure + gorgeous pyrotechnic art, and I wasn't sure he was going to sell me on whatever he was doing with the narrative voice, but I was willing to give him a chance, anyway. He did manage a certain hypnotic quality with it.

BUT. In issue 2 we learn that the reason all the main characters are women is because men are in fact extinct, because Zeus made it so (for reasons I now forget). So first I'm pissed because what, the only way you can have an Odyssey full of female warriors is by removing all the men completely from the picture?

And then further on in the issue we learn that the human race has continued to procreate via Fraction's female version of Prometheus, who created a third sex for humans, called a sebex. A member of this third sex somehow takes in their female partner's egg, fertilizes it, and carries it to term. These sebexes are treated as second-class citizens - iirc, they don't fight, they don't run the ship, they lounge around in lingerie waiting to be of sexual service to the women.

Meanwhile also in this issue we have tension between Odysseia and her sebex concubine, because the concubine wants to have Odysseia's children. When the sebex presses, Odysseia gets mad and at the end of the issue she leaves the sebex behind with the lotus eaters.

So, to recap: a) the women are in charge only because the men are all dead, b) women now hold all the institutional power, up to and including getting their children on people who don't have institutional power and exist in the universe solely for sex and babies, and c) this power imbalance that sounds oh-so-familiar is borne out in miniature with a little family drama featuring Asshole Protagonist and Clingy Lay. And geez, if I wanted to read about asshole men ruling the universe and treating women like shit, I would--

Wait, I would never want to read that. I have already read that so many times.

I was so pissed. It is possible Fraction buried something in the like six fold-out pages of worldbuilding in tiny print that I didn't read that would redeem this situation somehow, but I doubt it. Or maybe he's done something in subsequent issues that would make me hate this worldbuilding less, but again, I doubt it.

It really just boggles my mind that someone would set out to genderswap an all-male story into an all-female story and yet somehow so mangle the worldbuilding that the story might as well have been about men. It's actually kind of interesting to me how strongly the women in the story felt coded as men to me, and how much that impression depended on the sebex and their social role. Women in charge still read to me as women, but women in charge who put the entire burden of childbearing on another sex with lesser social power didn't feel like women to me anymore.

So yeah. That was disappointing. (Me and another anon went back and forth with some discussion here, if you want someone else's thoughts, too.)

Crossposted from Dreamwidth. Comment here or there. ( DW replies)