Having read quite a bit of Piers Anthony’s work, I noticed that it got consistently worse as he got older. I still think A Spell for Chameleon was pretty good (and so was Tarot, if you don’t mind the deliberate squick-inducing scenes), but anything he wrote after, say, 1986 is probably best avoided—everything had a tendency to turn into either pure fluff or softcore pornography.
The entire concept of Chameleon is nasty. Her backstory sets up all of the men from her village as being thrilled to take advantage of “Wynne” and universally unwilling to give “Fanchon” the time of day, while about half of them like “Dee”. (Anthony is notable for being outrageously sexist towards both genders at once.) Her lifelong ambition is to sit halfway between the two extremes permanently, sacrificing the chance to ever have her above-average intellect because she wants male approval and it’s conditional on being pretty (while she recognizes that being as stupid as she sometimes gets is a hazard). Bink is basically presented as a saint for putting up with the fact that she’s sometimes ugly for the sake of getting “variety”. It’s implied that in her smart phase he values her as a conversation partner but actually touching her then would be out of the question. I haven’t read the book in years, but I don’t remember Chameleon having any complaints about the dubious sort of acceptance Bink offers; she just loves him because he’s the protagonist and love means never having to say you want any accommodations whatsoever from your partner, apparently.
Having read quite a bit of Piers Anthony’s work, I noticed that it got consistently worse as he got older. I still think A Spell for Chameleon was pretty good (and so was Tarot, if you don’t mind the deliberate squick-inducing scenes), but anything he wrote after, say, 1986 is probably best avoided—everything had a tendency to turn into either pure fluff or softcore pornography.
The entire concept of Chameleon is nasty. Her backstory sets up all of the men from her village as being thrilled to take advantage of “Wynne” and universally unwilling to give “Fanchon” the time of day, while about half of them like “Dee”. (Anthony is notable for being outrageously sexist towards both genders at once.) Her lifelong ambition is to sit halfway between the two extremes permanently, sacrificing the chance to ever have her above-average intellect because she wants male approval and it’s conditional on being pretty (while she recognizes that being as stupid as she sometimes gets is a hazard). Bink is basically presented as a saint for putting up with the fact that she’s sometimes ugly for the sake of getting “variety”. It’s implied that in her smart phase he values her as a conversation partner but actually touching her then would be out of the question. I haven’t read the book in years, but I don’t remember Chameleon having any complaints about the dubious sort of acceptance Bink offers; she just loves him because he’s the protagonist and love means never having to say you want any accommodations whatsoever from your partner, apparently.