IT REALLY IS THAT BAD. IT IS AMAZING HOW HORRIBLE IT IS. And at the same time it's weirdly addictive: you just have to keep going to see what horrible whumpage is going to descend on poor Elsie next.
I imagine that girls hated Elsie because she was the one parents compared them to? "Why can't you be more like Elsie Dinsmore," a hypothetical mother asks, and her young sprout goes up to her room and gives the Elsie books a vicious kick. Probably no one ever got told they ought to be more like Horace Dinsmore, Worst Father Ever.
The Elsie books are so fucked up that I was actually in favor of Elsie marrying her dad's friend. Is it creepy that he has clearly had his eye on her since she was eight? And is also literally old enough to be her father? Yes and yes, but he was clearly the best of a raft of terrible options and ALSO he will get her away from her father, thank God.
I actually meant to read the book set after Elsie's marriage, but somehow I lost interest in it; so much of the "Oh my God WHAT" in those books came from Elsie & her father's relationship, I thought that an Elsie book post-marriage might be boring. Especially as we won't be getting an Elsie-eye-view on the sex, which would have been... well, probably bizarre and terrible like everything else in these books. But illuminatingly bizarre and terrible, like everything else in these books.
I think it was Vision Forum; I remember that all the bookstores had them on the YA tables and I looked at them speculatively because I was about the right age, but I never did read them, thank God.
What would fix-it fic for Elsie even look like? Does she get sent away to boarding school before she ever meets her father, and the gentle and loving teachers draw her out of her misery?
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I imagine that girls hated Elsie because she was the one parents compared them to? "Why can't you be more like Elsie Dinsmore," a hypothetical mother asks, and her young sprout goes up to her room and gives the Elsie books a vicious kick. Probably no one ever got told they ought to be more like Horace Dinsmore, Worst Father Ever.
The Elsie books are so fucked up that I was actually in favor of Elsie marrying her dad's friend. Is it creepy that he has clearly had his eye on her since she was eight? And is also literally old enough to be her father? Yes and yes, but he was clearly the best of a raft of terrible options and ALSO he will get her away from her father, thank God.
I actually meant to read the book set after Elsie's marriage, but somehow I lost interest in it; so much of the "Oh my God WHAT" in those books came from Elsie & her father's relationship, I thought that an Elsie book post-marriage might be boring. Especially as we won't be getting an Elsie-eye-view on the sex, which would have been... well, probably bizarre and terrible like everything else in these books. But illuminatingly bizarre and terrible, like everything else in these books.
I think it was Vision Forum; I remember that all the bookstores had them on the YA tables and I looked at them speculatively because I was about the right age, but I never did read them, thank God.
What would fix-it fic for Elsie even look like? Does she get sent away to boarding school before she ever meets her father, and the gentle and loving teachers draw her out of her misery?