*

So, last night when I was suffering through Living with the Dead (aka The One Kelley Armstrong Just Phoned In) from the Women of the Otherworld series, I got to thinking about the stuff that I like about the Otherworld books that are not that one

and I immediately arrived on the topic of

SEX SCENES

The thing that I realized I super love about the majority of Armstrong’s romance stuff in the Otherworld books is that she has mastered the art of making sex scenes/love scenes actually unique to the characters involved.

WILD SHIT RIGHT?!!

But as a person who has read literally scores of romance novels this year, that is a bonafide and admirable SKILL. With some authors you can tell which couples they like best because their sex scenes will actually have their personalities on display; with other authors you could basically replace any given pairing with any other and not notice; very few are uniformly good at discrete sex scenes!

In the Otherworld books, everyone is different! You would never ever mistake an Elena/Clay scene for a Paige/Lucas scene for a Jaime/Jeremy scene for an Eve/Kristof scene, etc. The way she writes them is not only particular to the characters themselves and their specific relationships, but it’s also revelatory and shows you things about the characters and said relationships that might not be as effectively displayed elsewhere!

Elena and Clay’s scenes are striking not just because they like to roll around in the dirt or what have you, but because they’re so COMFORTABLE with each other. You can feel the full decade plus of their relationship in how casual and almost lazy they are about it, — even when they’re rolling around in aforementioned dirt — and you couldn’t imagine stuff like him feeding her pancakes in Stolen while they’re boning with anyone else!

And it’s like that with all the others! Eve and Kristof and their long history and their years of YEARNING and their dirty talk! Jaime and Jeremy who are older, mature but also the NEWEST in their relationship so spend a lot of time feeling each other out~! And Paige and Lucas who you can often forget are TOTAL BABIES because so much of their narrative revolves around them parenting a teenager, but then you read how ridiculously playful they are with their sexuality and also notice that they will fuck — or at least attempt to — pretty much any time they’re left alone for five minutes and you recall OH RIGHT THEY STARTED OFF IN THEIR EARLY TWENTIES.

So yeah, it’s not an easy thing to do — to make characters and couples distinct and then KEEP those unique traits when they start sexing it up, and I legitimately admire and am delighted by how well Kelley Armstrong does it, and it’s a huge reason that I enjoy the various Otherworld pairings so much.

An addendum: I also realized this ties into how tragically underwritten I feel that Hope is because I realized lolololol I have no idea what hers and Karl’s sex is like. But then I generally feel that I don’t know anything substantial about Hope at all except her supernatural stats.

31 Notes/ Hide

  1. mongooseland reblogged this from glamaphonic
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  6. delladilly said: O K I WILL READ THESE BOOKS
  7. ladysaviours reblogged this from glamaphonic
  8. lodessa said: I was just bemoaning to a friend that I felt like I was getting overly predictable in the way I write sex scenes… like: Does this one sound exactly the same as one in another fic? Maybe? Fuck!
  9. ladysaviours said: yessss. and like how some of them will fade to black- like have you ever noticed that we never actually see the gritty details of Paige and Lucas, but we do with Clay/Elena and Eve/Kris?
  10. glamaphonic posted this