It is the way of things on Gor, that a slave, being beautiful, must be beautifully enslaved...

.
weepingcock has done it again!


Gay, Bejeweled Nazi Bikers of Gor


For those of you who have not had the...pleasure... the Gor novels, by John Norman (pseudonym of a real live Harvard English professor!), are a series of hideously written scifi-fantasy novels about an "alternate Earth" called Gor, in which manly men, who are manly because they know the True Way of Things, that way being the way that allows them to be manly, unlike the unmanly men of Earth who are definitely NOT manly, or men, but are of Earth, and not of Gor...where was I? Oh yeah. The Gor novels are about the struggles of the manly populace to rule over the slaves, who are women, mostly, because it is the True Way of Things for women to be slaves, beautiful slaves. In silk. And collars. Beautiful collars, which are beautiful because they are slave collars, placed around the necks of the beautiful slaves by their manly owners...DAMMIT.

*ahem* Start again!

For those of you who have not had the pleasure, the Gor novels are exceedingly wordy books about war and sex and gender relations on a planet called Gor. THAT'S ALL.

But they really are wonderful, in that Theissian Eye of Argon way. Meaning they're actually awful, but will convulse you with laughter. Incessantly turgid, and yet strangely torpid, every page awash in this hellaciously hairy prose as purple as a ten-inch hardon. Just gloriously, self-consciously pumped up with Importance. They're collector's items now, so they don't come cheap, but if you ever see one, jump on it. They're truly worth the coin.

Oh, and the weepingcock entry linked above? Is to a parody that is utterly BRILLIANT in its evocation of Norman's...writing. Read and be choked with laughter. You'll wonder "Can the original really be this bad?" Rest assured, it can.

Oh yes. It really, really can.


P.S. In the comments is the link to Houseplants of Gor, yet another incredible parody.

Alternative Tolkien - John Norman

.

In honor of britgirlsf, who posted the brilliance that I mentioned in my last post, I give you... *drumroll*



John Norman:



I, Frodo Baggins, formerly of the Shire, am one who is known to Sauron of Mordor.

It came about late in the month of En’Kara in the year of 10,117 of the Third Age that I awoke to the soothing touch of a small sponge that bathed my forehead.

I grabbed the hand that held the sponge and found that I held a girl’s wrist. “Who are you?” I asked.

I lay on a stone platform padded by heavy sleeping pelts and numerous scarves of yellow and red silk.

“Please.” Said the girl.

She was comely with light hair straight and bound simply behind her back with a small ribbon of yellow silk. Her eyes blue and sullen. Her full, red lips, seemed to pout sensuously, rebelliously, and perhaps subtly contemptuously.

“I am Arwen,” she responded “your slave.”

I released her wrist.

She knelt resting on her heels with her back straight. In her eyes there seemed to burn an irritable fury of helpless rage. I smiled but she did not smile back, looking away angrily.

When she again raised her head I saw about her throat, as I expected, graceful and gleaming, the silver collar of a Mordor slave girl.

“Your demeanor does not suggest that of a slave girl.” I said.

“I am a chamber slave.” She whispered. “As long as you are in this room, you may do with me as you please. Master.”

Her shoulders shook with rage at my widened smile.

“I see I must teach you the meaning of your collar.” I said, rising and stepping towards her. She scrambled to the corner of the room with a cry.

My laugh was loud.

Blog rec: Wil Wheaton's ST:NG reviews

.
So, as you guys have probably already surmised, I'm an Star Trek: Original Series girl. Nothing beats the cool logic of Mr. Spock, the crusty quips of Dr. McCoy ("I'm a doctor, not a scriptwriter!"), the hot legs of Lieutenant Uhura, or the rampant Casanova complex of Captain Kirk. (Although those occasional love handles can put a damper on things.) Certainly Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its cardboard characters and rather grimly humorless PC stance (you can thank Gene Roddenberry's rather unrealistic vision of the future for that aspect of it), bores the pants off me most of the time. Just about the only episodes I ever liked were the ones that either linked back or were obvious rewrites of TOS episodes. I think the only NG episode that didn't hark back in one way or another that I really approved of was Family, in which Picard, Wesley, and Worf all had to deal with their families and the ramifications of time and choice. That had substance that wasn't either forced or self-consciously "tolerant"; its depth came from who the characters were at heart (imagine my surprise that they actually had them), not from what "ingenious" situations they were pushed into. (The quote marks come from the fact that there was very little ingeniousness in the series - the writers ans producers just thought they were being so. Big difference.)

But whether you liked the series as a whole or not, one thing that just about everybody agreed on was the character of Ensign Wesley Crusher. In a word, he was an annoying little dweeb. (Okay, that's three words, but you get the point.) This came mostly from the writers, who thought it would be cute to make one of the major characters a kid, and then didn't know what the hell to do with him. After all, you take an adolescent know-it-all, stick him in the middle of the workings of a military starship, and how's he gonna be anything but annoying? It took quite a while before they put any real effort into developing the guy out of his brattiness and dumb-ass mistakes; meanwhile, the audience had great fun throwing tomatoes at him.

The other problem was Wil Wheaton, who played Wesley. Not that he was a bad actor at all; Stand By Me proved he could be really wonderful and touching. But he didn't seem quite sure what to do with the guy, given that his lines were so dreadful and the character himself was such a giant hardoff. And he had a callow prettiness that worked against him, I always thought. I kept wondering why the hell he wasn't off chasing girls instead of whining at his mom or bugging Picard. (For those of you who don't know or don't care to remember, the Enterprise Mach MMXVIII supposedly had whole families on board, a fact that freaked Picard out in the first episode and then seemed to disappear from sight. Great, guys - what was the point of THAT?) It took Wheaton quite a while to find his balance in the role as well, and by then it was pretty much too late. Everyone had grown to love hating Wesley, so his efforts were kind of a moot point.

Anyway, for those of you given to a bit of day-before-yesterday nostalgia, I thought I'd point you to something pretty damn cool: Wil Wheaton's ST:NG review blog over at TV Squad. Every now and then, when he has the time and the inclination, he posts a detailed review of an episode. He started with the very first episode, and he's picking his way through the series chronologically, choosing episodes that he feels he has something to say about.

And what reviews they are! Wheaton's a very good blogger, as anyone who's read his personal blog knows. He's sharp, funny, and tempers his snarkiness with an accomplished story sense. Plus there's all that personal experience to draw on, as he includes in each review a section dedicated to his memories of filming the particular episode in question, so you get not only opinion, but information as well. This is the sort of thing that review columns should be about, and so seldom are - the complete experience of a piece of entertainment, not just an excuse for the critic to show off how speshul his views are.


This way to the Briefing Room!


If you take my advice, you'll start at the beginning and work your way up the list - there's a particular flavor to reading Wheaton's analysis of the show's development as a whole, as well as his thoughts on each individual episode. But any way you read it, it's a damn hoot.

ETA: Okay, looking back at the blog, I see that it's not exactly in chronological order, but the issue of series development still holds. As there seems to be no "previous page" button over there, I shall now give you a list of links to the blog entries as they were posted. Yes, I have no life. Wanna make something of it?

( List over here )

As I have no ST icon, instead I give you the next best thing - Lt. Tawny Madison's boobies!