NEW YORK CITY – Robert L. Stonesmith, author of the massively popular fantasy novel “The Fires of Ravensmoor”, took to Twitter yesterday to defend the book’s rampant sexism, stating that his story about two dragons on an epic quest to find a magical talking sword needed it in order to maintain an atmosphere of historical accuracy.
“I am tired of having to justify this,” Stonesmith tweeted in a thread that instantly went viral and put his book back on top of the New York Times Bestseller list. “My novel is set in a medieval world. Everyone knows that the most popular things in medieval times were rape, the constant threats of rape, and tapestries of oddly-drawn stags. It’s just the way things were.”
“I’ve written some amazingly well-rounded female characters,” he continued, putting a wink emoji after the word ‘rounded’, “but if the Elven Sorceress Tiranelle isn’t sexually harassed in the first 50 pages, people are going to question my research.”
Fans were quick to defend Stonesmith, with fellow Twitter user Ryan Green highlighting other ways the author had successfully established the period.
“He’s just being faithful to the time,” Green posted. “The book has taverns, knights, and kings; of course it’s going to have some gender inequality. Sure, everyone has magical powers that could hypothetically rule out physical violence forever, but obviously he’s made the decision that his magical society is the exact same as ours in all the ways that suck for women. Deal with it!”
“I did think it was odd that he chose to portray such a homogeneous population given the wealth of information we have on racial distribution in the Middle Ages,” explained Marty Sheeling, professor of medieval history at New York University. “However, I do commend Mr. Stonesmith on the accuracy of the all-female Dragon orgy. If he had gotten the physiology wrong, it would have taken me out of the story completely.”
Stonesmith was most recently in talks to turn the book into a miniseries where all the female characters, including the Basilisks, get naked some point, because women were often naked in medieval times.
