Why I love Octavia Butler's Writing style and how she conquers sensitive topic with it.....also a random thing about the femal victim role in sci fi.

    Octavia Butler is already so wildly celebrated and recognized, but that won't stop me from doing the same :). I found her writing to be refreshing and flowing; no info dumps, pretentious science explanations that sound like a 12 year old boy wrote it, just pure narrative from a fictional source that is actually experiencing whatever strange new world Octavia drops us into.

    Needless to say, Octavia Butler is into some WEIRD stuff, but in my eyes that's not exactly a deterrent. Her work turns things that could easily be considered campy or simply gross into something interesting and thought provoking, but that's because she digs DEEP and gives every detail of the story special attention and care - but really that's all you need to make any story worth reading.

I think that is what made the first story we read in class so sophisticated - I say while still being mindful of it's terribly disturbing aspects (it would be pretty hard for Butler to downplay those traits anyways). The truth is the weird sexual/farming slavery of humans by aliens is super interesting, and maybe just as plausible as one of the common alien invasion tropes. Besides, the characterization of all of the humans and aliens is incredible, the interpersonal social aspects of post invasion world is not something I had really considered before ( I kind of assumed we'd be mostly dead). I think this story also drew some strong real-life parallels of slavery, abuse, and Stockholm syndrome. Honestly, the way she wrote for the main alien almost made me understand it's side, ALMOST. (did I almost get Stockholm syndromes by Butler?). This story also made me think a lot about how we treat the animals we use for food, clothing, etc. Even in the case of the aliens being superior to humans (as many assume we are to animals), everything they do to the humans seem incredibly wrong; it's even more sickening when you think about how we violate animals in just as inhumane ways (Maybe we don't try to use them to grow our parasitic offspring, but we still do some terrible things that we try to justify.) Overall the power dynamic between the alien and her human is totally disconcerting, it would almost be easier to understand if she was just overtly physically abusive, and did not act as some kind of family member.
          And now for the last little bit that I kind of built up in the title. What I found completely interesting was how I perceived the protagonist, the stereotypical victim character to be female, even thought he was overtly defined as male. While I don't like the fact that I subconsciously assumed that, I think Butler may intentionally written the main character as a doted on, but raped and manipulated young person, in order to make the statement that we are biased to assume that a victim is female, for good or bad reason I'm not sure.