On Tuesday, August 19, 2003, at 01:42 PM, Matthew Hunter wrote: > On Tue, Aug 19, 2003 at 01:54:13PM -0400, Alexx S Kay > <alexx at theworld.com> wrote: >>> >>> Warning: There Be Spoilers Ahead >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >>> . >> [snip] >> >>> The divergence from Dumas that shocked me was Pel putting friendship >>> above >>> ambition and switching sides to fight for Zerika. As a Dumas fan, >>> this >>> totally blindsided me. OTOH, the gods make a comment at the end >>> that do >>> leave Pel's true motives a bit up in the air. >> Blindsided me, too. I think one of the primary differences between >> Brust >> and Dumas is that Brust is less of a bastard :-) He is reluctant to >> put >> his characters though as much emotional conflict as Dumas was. And >> note >> that Brust was unable (or perhaps merely unwilling) to come up with >> any >> antagonist characters remotely as compelling as Milady and Mordaunt. >> Greycat and Grita stand in a loosely-parallel position, but neither of >> them has (IMNSHO) the palpable sense of power and evil that graced >> Dumas' villains. > I think this is a fair criticism. Maybe, but it's actually something I rather like about the books. Truly menacing, powerful, evil figures are pretty thin on the ground around Earth, and I'm guessing the population of Earth far exceeds the population of Dragaera. So I'd imagine they'd pop up even less often there. Instead, we see a lot of people who aren't truly evil screwing up. Adron could easily be cast as a power-hungry, evil bastard, but instead we find someone who thought they were doing the right thing in general, had a bad reaction to circumstance and screwed up big. The Jenoine could be cast as truly evil bastards, but quite frankly, they seem to show up as basically scientists with pretty questionable ethics trying to get their experiment back under control. Or at least figure out what went wrong. I mean, if I was running an experiment on the behavior of parakeets in a hot, urban classroom, and then one of my lab techs suddenly caused the classroom, the university, the city and the suburbs surrounding to explode into a roiling sea of chaos, I'd sure as hell want to know what happened. Probably wouldn't care too much about what I did to the remaining parakeets in the process, either. Basically, Dragaera seems to be populated with a bunch of normal (albeit maybe a little more touchy on average) people with big toys. Take Morrolon. Touchy guy, yes, but I'm guessing if you gave your standard, struggling grad student (or even, perhaps, writer) witchcraft, sorcery (post- and pre-empire), a floating castle and "an infantry battalion disguised as a sword," you'd see something pretty similar. I mean, which is going to be more effective: politely asking the power company to please not lose electricity while you're working on your Very Important Paper, or furiously marching into the board room with a soul-eating sword and suggesting that next time, you're not going to be able to contain yourself? While the latter is much more menacing and evil, it would be a hard temptation to avoid. Trust me on that one. I suspect SKZB and PDDB (do all the Scribblies have four initials, and/or is this merely coincidence?) would probably feel similarly if they were in the middle of a writer's hot streak and a power outage took out a few hours work on their latest manuscript. Anyways. Making up truly evil, menacing Bad Guys for the Good Guys to go gleefully (or irritatingly self-sacrificingly) Over The River and Through The Woods to kill in a climactic final battle of Light Versus Dark gets really damn tedious after you read it a few times. At least it did for me. So it's nice to not see this happen so often, and in those cases where it's getting that way, it's nice to see the hero of the book (in the case of the Vladiad) complaining about it with me. Well, if you consider Vlad the hero of the Vladiad. I get the feeling sometimes that Loiosh is really the hero. -Adam