(no subject)

[cahn]

Please rec me books with dads who are major characters (important secondary character is fine) and for whom parenting is an important component of their character, with kids who are older at the time of canon (teenager or above). They don't need to be good parents, necessarily, and they can make horrible mistakes, but they should be (relatively?) non-abusive and clearly love their kid(s).

So far I've got

-Aral Vorkosigan (...I guess he's not super a main character any more, but he casts a pretty long shadow)
-Atticus Finch
-Andrew Wiggin
-Jean Valjean
-Reb Saunders and David Malter
-Van Hohenheim (taking the prize for not being a good parent and making horrible mistakes...)

...this is a much lower percentage of the books we own than I had thought it would be!

Comments

[cahn]

This is actually soooo interesting, please always feel free to jump in with examples from classical lit :)

For me, I guess the dividing line comes down to whether the reader would reasonably be familiar with the quotation/allusion or not. (Which depends on the author, too. John M. Ford, since he came up earlier, basically expects familiarity with a much wider swath of literature, including e.g., Charles Williams, who isn't normally on the Western-canon list -- he is the reason I have read a whole bunch of Charles Williams now. Though he flags it by also having additional attributed quotes from Williams as epigraphs.) I feel like Duane can reasonably expect her audience to know Narnia and LOTR (in fact, earlier in Wounded Sky Harb is walking around in a simulation of the world "Lorien," with elanor in the grass, which isn't explicated any further).

I seem to remember the Cassie Clare thing being around two issues, one of which I think is serious and the other of which I don't. One was a bunch of unattributed Buffy (and other TV) quotations -- and I don't think that is at all a big deal because it's reasonable to expect her target audience would be able to spot those. Obviously not everyone, I read some of her stuff at the time and I hadn't watched any Buffy, but I was aware that it was sort of "geek cultural literacy." The other problem, and much more serious in my opinion, was that she had big unattributed parts from Pamela Dean's Secret Country novels, which in my opinion are not reasonable to expect a reader to be familiar with (unless she'd previously made a big deal out of those books and/or used them repeatedly with attributed quotations, as Ford does with Williams, which I don't think she did). (Even then I don't think that very small bits, like a phrase or two, would have bothered me, not in fanfic. you should see my teenage MacGyver fanfic, omg But this was much larger swathes of text.)

That all being said, in Duane's case I think it is also very possible it was carelessness, because I've certainly had issues with Duane being careless before. I went to reread and I agree that it's definitely the case Watsonially that Uhura and Burke, themselves, weren't consciously referring to Narnia, whatever one might say Doylistically, and Duane seems not to do that elsewhere in the book (unless you count the Others saying "We are who are," which in any case was picked up on by McCoy and Spock even though the Others obviously didn't realize that their words were allusive). But I guess because Duane does do so many particularly-geek allusions, and because it's Narnia, and in particular a bit of Narnia that I would never be able to read as not Narnia (it's a pretty memorable bit, at least for me), it doesn't bother me because I would never have read it as Duane's words rather than Lewis's.