With regards to Anita, there would need to be at least major attitude changes with some of the characters, if not their deaths
It needs more than an attitude change. At the very least, the "ardeur" has to go, which means Jean Claude has to die. Richard is now utterly beyond hope, but Jean Claude's death would kill him anyway (although at this point, IMHO death is too good for him).
Their deaths would create a place from which the series could possibly be rebuilt into something worth continuing: Anita's unorthodox lifestyle would still be an issue re. her police work, but on a far more realistic footing. Her powers can still be a big deal, just without the giant-vagina-of-doom and the vamps can be the bad guys again, which is as it should be. The shapeshifter stuff was always more interesting.
Anita needs some human friends. Actual friends, not antagonists. Like Edward, like Ronnie-as-she-was and whatever happened to her lawyer friend whose wedding was such a big deal in the first few books? Catherine, was it? Human friends who think in human ways could bring Anita some much-needed self-awareness - someone, for example, needs to point out to her that she's guilty of rape. Multiple times.
Most importantly, though, LKH needs to get it through her thick head that angst does not equal plot, and sex does not equal plot. A novel-length story needs to have actual plot beyond those two things. Otherwise, all she's writing is porn. I've got nothing against porn, but I resent it being packaged as something else.
That's a major place where the Anita books went wrong, all the sex scenes.
I'm not sure I quite agree. I think the reason all the sex scenes mess up the series is because LKH haas no idea how to write sex. Her peculiar vocabulary aside (though that's a major part of the problem), in a novel sex should move the plot forward. With the Merry books, it started out that way, then got lost. I have some hope that she's regaining that. Similarly, in the Anita series the earliest sex scenes, such as in Blue Moon were absolutely integral to the plot. As porn, it was awful, but that didn't matter because it moved the plot forward. But somewhere along the way they became just bad porn to no clear purpose.
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It needs more than an attitude change. At the very least, the "ardeur" has to go, which means Jean Claude has to die. Richard is now utterly beyond hope, but Jean Claude's death would kill him anyway (although at this point, IMHO death is too good for him).
Their deaths would create a place from which the series could possibly be rebuilt into something worth continuing: Anita's unorthodox lifestyle would still be an issue re. her police work, but on a far more realistic footing. Her powers can still be a big deal, just without the giant-vagina-of-doom and the vamps can be the bad guys again, which is as it should be. The shapeshifter stuff was always more interesting.
Anita needs some human friends. Actual friends, not antagonists. Like Edward, like Ronnie-as-she-was and whatever happened to her lawyer friend whose wedding was such a big deal in the first few books? Catherine, was it? Human friends who think in human ways could bring Anita some much-needed self-awareness - someone, for example, needs to point out to her that she's guilty of rape. Multiple times.
Most importantly, though, LKH needs to get it through her thick head that angst does not equal plot, and sex does not equal plot. A novel-length story needs to have actual plot beyond those two things. Otherwise, all she's writing is porn. I've got nothing against porn, but I resent it being packaged as something else.
That's a major place where the Anita books went wrong, all the sex scenes.
I'm not sure I quite agree. I think the reason all the sex scenes mess up the series is because LKH haas no idea how to write sex. Her peculiar vocabulary aside (though that's a major part of the problem), in a novel sex should move the plot forward. With the Merry books, it started out that way, then got lost. I have some hope that she's regaining that. Similarly, in the Anita series the earliest sex scenes, such as in Blue Moon were absolutely integral to the plot. As porn, it was awful, but that didn't matter because it moved the plot forward. But somewhere along the way they became just bad porn to no clear purpose.