elanya

So I finally finished the series, yay! I liked it, though I can understand why some people were less thrilled with the third book than the first two. None of the threats feel serious enough. If I were an editor, I’d have made her take out Nalia. Nalia feels like a character that got away from the author and then needed to be justified. She kills Niryn, but I can’t decide if that’s because she needed to have *some* purpose or because the author needed a way to have him dealt with so that the battle between Tamìr and Korin could be more of a one-on-one fight. It is fitting for her story that she kills Niryn, but she is so undeveloped outside the story of his influence that it feels too narratively convenient. I kept expecting Ki to die in the last fight. If he had, and Tamìr had resisted taking anyone else as a lover, & *then* Nalia and her child would have become actually important. Oh, I guess she also give Caliel and Tanil something to do at the end. As for Ki, on one hand, I’m happy for Tamìr and his sake that they got their ‘happy ever after’ ending, but then it also feels a little too neat. But these are hard things to manage, and I know I have pulled similar stuff in my stories and found them clever. It’s always so much easier to be critical of others. I can’t proofread my own work for spelling and typos, let alone content. At least I’ll take advice on the first two.

Anyway, all of the above has got me thinking about fantasy literature, and romance in fiction. I need to find a way to make fantasy satisfying again. In general, you know the good guy is going to win. With that in mind, I’m going to talk about A Song of Ice and Fire. Now, one of the reasons I like GRRM’s books is because good and evil aren’t always all that clear. But even there you’ve got some clear lines. The Others? They’re bad guys. The slave-holding cities that Daenarys fights? Yup, bad guys. Some bad guys are just bad guys with some fun panache, but they’re still clearly villains. Creating that confusion is engrossing, but it doesn’t solve the problem for me of making the inevitable victory feel satisfying. It is one of the reasons I *don’t* like Daenerys as a character. She is the least real character to me – too fantastic, with her dragons and her girl-queen-learning-to-rule-while-men-vye-for-her-hand-for-power, and her claim to the throne. Even her faults are fantasy faults - they’re not real person faults. While this is true of some other characters, I’m less forgiving of her. Why? It is hard not to see her sitting on the Iron Throne when all is said and done – and if she doesn’t wind up in control of the Kingdoms, it is going to take some very clever writing to justify her inclusion story. She’s too isolated from the rest of the characters. And hey maybe that’s why she seems more fantastic to me – she doesn’t have other points of view in her corner of the world to help humanize her and give the readers more insight in to the broader picture. Maybe that’s going to change though, and maybe my opinion will too.

So, my problem is still unaddressed. It’s a circle of sorts. You know the good guys have to win, which reflects on how I view the challenges they face. If they win don’t by the end of the story, that’s not very satisfying either, is it? (Note, I said end of the story, not end of the book.) So, then, the journey has to be worth it, doesn’t it? Is it enough for the challenges to be interesting, and the solutions creative? If an author can draw us in to the conflicts and characters on some personal level, is that enough to allow us to be satisfied with their inevitable triumph? Or maybe temper victory with some other great loss, they way it was emphatically not done in TO’sQ?

Is the answer to move the away from being about winning? Away from good versus evil and that kind of epic conflict? I had a point here but I think it wandered away from me a while ago. I’m getting kind of tired. But this is something that I was thinking about all the while I was reading this book. The outcome was a forgone conclusion, it was only the details (and some of the personal relationships) that were left.

But take this scenario:

There is a Rightful Ruler. S/he is legitimately sanctioned by some Greater Power (gods, prophesy, both, whatever) and/or by social custom. S/he is a bad ruler - crazy, evil, stupid, whatever. Competent Protagonist sees Rightful Ruler’s flaws, gathers allies to force change and Save the Land.

This is actually part of the backstory for both the series above, if you look a generation or less back. But leave it there. Let’s not have Competent Protagonist become a drunk or go crazy or become manipulated by villains. Let them stay competent and rule. Can we keep the story focused on them and have it work, I wonder? What happens *then* when Rightful Heir comes along? What if Rightful Heir is also competent? What if s/he is not, but still has some kind of meaningful official sanction? Would readers care about a story where it isn’t a matter of good or evil, but more about legitimacy and power? ASOIAF is almost like that, only the point there is that the legitimacy issues *aren’t* all that clear, because there are multiple sources of authority vying for power. I mean Good versus Authority, or Good versus Good. I think it is a more interesting question because there isn’t as clear a ‘right’ answer - at elast there should be a way to do it without it descending into good versus evil, shouldn't there? Ahh there’s my point. Has this been done well in fantasy and I’ve missed it somewhere? What I want is for good, in concept, not to be boring. I think I’ll stop now, as I am getting too rambling and sleepy.

Instead, have some...

Completely unrelated news:

The way I am sitting reveals the lingering traces of the most disgusting stretch marks on my hips/thighs. That shit is not attractive.

Also, the woman at the check in desk remembered me from last year! Or at least I look familiar to her from somewhere, but I do have one of those faces. I get that a lot :p

(I’m actually writing this Sunday night, and were I to post it, my mood would currently be ‘cynical’, but I doubt it will go up until Monday morning at the earliest. Music is Decemberists – 17 Military Wives.)

I forgot that the rooms here don’t have clocks. Good thing my meeting isn’t until noon! I’m going to wind up getting a new travel alarm clock every time I come to this country, I swear :p

I also need some water.