well behaved women

I came across another one of those 'why are vampires attractive?' posts and thought of an entirely new angle: maybe they like them because they're creepy undead constantly-chomping monsters. I mean, some people find aliens with corrosive bodily fluids hot, I don't judge. Just saying. Fiction rarely portrays them as so, but what the hell. I've glimpsed porn for 30 days of night.

Also, this is my new vampire icon forever and ever. GREEBO OMG. My favorite fictional male character ever.

Stray

I'd been warned about Strays—werecats without a Pride, constantly on the lookout for someone like me: attractive

Oh....man. Just....oh man. To cap it all off, her name is Faythe--Mary Sue, anyone? that old faux-imaginative spelling got real old five seconds after it started--and she claims, unlike most of my fellow tabby-cats, I knew how to fight--because she's just so speshul--and, like all Mary Sues, she brags about it but in an actual fight can't do a damn thing.

I have no problem with a female character who can't physically defend herself, but almost every single Mary Sue fanfic I've read has the exact same pattern going on: she boasts about being kickass, goes looking for trouble and then--usually with a little throwaway comment like 'oh I'm tired' or 'oh I don't have enough practice'--doesn't win a single tussle. (In the first chapter of the book there's a fight that makes it oh-so-painfully apparent the author has never been in so much as a hair-pulling match which the heroine wins thoroughly unconvincingly, though that might be because of the bad writing.) There are distinctive writing patterns for these fights, too, and this book fits them to a T. There are authors out there who do an approximation just fine--Joanne Baldwin lost a lot of fights but Rachel Caine never once had me doubting she was truly an awesomely badass lady--but this author simply lacks the competence. So far; admittedly I haven't gotten past the first chapter. My eyes have been rolling so hard I was afraid I'd cripple myself.

Also, the stray/bad guy that attacks her is foreign (foreign shapeshifters smell inherently different for some bizarre and unexplained reason) curses at her in Spanish and has greasy hair. I half expected her to have him twirling a moustache.

"I hate it when men aren’t afraid of me", Faythe takes the time to pout as she's dragged off by this terrible evildoer. Honey, I wouldn't be afraid of anything but your temper tantrums and you could knock me over with a sponge.

Let's see how the rest of it goes. I might give up and toss it back in the library bag real soon, you never know. Soon I'll discover if the love interest is as loathesome as I've been told, if we're ever presented with good wholesome caucasian villains, and if Faythe ever develops a real personality and/or actually has a fight that isn't a) painfully boring and b) painfully unconvincing.