Hooray for other people using the Canary! There is a lot of awful fantasy series out there, and so little life to waste on them.

Good review; it's convinced me that the Rape Watch should include torture scenes, because it strikes me they are closely-related phenomena: a fantasy novel with a lot of rape will also tend to have a lot of torture, and a fantasy novel which handles rape badly will tend to handle torture badly. (They're basically both forms of violence against people who can't fight back, after all; sometimes they even stem from the same motives, and sometimes the one leads to t'other.)

Maybe we should rename it The Ferretbrain "Rape, Torture, It's Just a Shot Away, It's Just a Shot Away" Watch.

Hmmm, that might be just a little verbose ;-)

Perhaps The Book Of Words could work as beginner fantasy. You know, with looming Prophecies and Evil Wizards as the equivalent of training wheels.

At the risk of starting the whole Fantasy Rape Debate again, I think whether you bundle rape in with torture depends on exactly what you're trying to keep track of. As I've said many times before, and as Kyra points out in this article, the thing about the Obligatory Fantasy Rape Scene is that not only is it only women who get raped (because as we all know, man-on-man rape is much, much worse, leading to the dreaded Phantom Dick Syndrome), but that frequently the men have nothing bad happen to them at all.

Which is kind of my point: books where women tend to get raped while men are treated decently by their captors tend to also be books where women get tortured while men are treated decently by their captives. (After all, if you're not squeamish about one, you are mildly less likely to be squeamish about the other.) Then again, there are exceptions, and I personally wouldn't let a book off for an unbalanced/poorly-handled/batshit crazy attitude towards torture any more than I would for a similar attitude towards rape. Jones, it seems, has managed to include a vigorously unfair treatment of both subjects, and the review's done a good job of roasting her for both of 'em. I'm not trying to say that rape and torture are precisely the same thing (although it's obviously possible to blur the line between the two), but they are both horrible things that fantasy authors mishandle on a depressingly regular basis, and I'd be hard-pressed to say which was worse. (I should stress, incidentally, that I'm talking about realistic torture, not the sort of fakey-fake "I'm going to take the secrets out of your mind with the Jewel of Truth!" torture that's been a regular feature of fantasy, and doesn't resemble real torture any more than waving a porno magazine in someone's face resembles actually raping someone.)

In terms of what we're trying to keep track of, you're right that one of the most frequent problems is that while fantasy authors will tend to horribly mistreat one class of character while giving another a free ride. As has been pointed out, A Song of Ice and Fire is decent in this regard: yes, women get raped to pieces, but men get tortured to shreds, and it kind of makes sense - in the sort of medieval society Martin depicts women prisoners are mistreated differently from male prisoners, but they both get mistreated and it's nigh-impossible to say who comes out worse. If we were only keeping track of rape and ignoring torture, we'd miss that nuance.

Basically I think we're on the same page here - Kyra's "Fantasy Rape Watch" has never been strictly limited to rape, it's more of a Fantasy Mysoginy Watch. It's just that "Rape Watch!" is punchier.

Quite - there is a bit of torture in The Book of the Words but it's of the cheerful, bouncy 'no hard feelings' variety that, as you point out, is kind of common in certain types of fantasy.

Also Prince Kylock does have to fuck his dead bride - which is a pretty damn vile thing to happen to anybody.

But, yes, thanks for the reading canary... sorry I killed it.

Also have you seen the cover art for God's sake? Jack looks all excited and ready for his manly adventures while Melliandra is looking nervously over her shoulder in case of rape.