RPG/Drizzt/Forgotten Realms rambling, part the third

[telophase]

I have now finished Sojourn, the third book in the Drizzzzzt origin trilogy, and I have a confession to make...



...I actually kind of liked the book.

Don't get me wrong, it's still got huge wodges of OH R.A. SALVATORE NO and it's mired in the mud by Forgotten Realms wonky worldbuilding, but the thing is, there's actually a decent story hidden in there, one I'd have liked to read if all the RPG detritus were struck from it and the female ranger either written better or taken out completely.

And that was a pleasant surprise: that after that three-page intro of her acting coquettish I quoted earlier, her party went out to check out the reports of this weirdo drow hanging about, decided since he wasn't being all evil that they'd keep an eye on him instead of killing him, and other than a mention when another character reads a message from her later in the book, she never appears again. So I didn't have to chuck the book at the wall every time she showed up. I'd much rather read a book with no women in it and decide that okay, it's a sexist, misogynist society, and go with the narrative flow than read a book that's a sexist, misogynist society with a GIANT PINK LACY BOW ON TOP.

The prose is smoother, with much less stuff like "A raven's coat was its tested scales,"[0] and I don't think Drizzt flashed his lavender orbs once.[1] He started to be stoic, however, a condition which I am assured continues for a good long time. There's lots of monster-killing, of course, as it's an RPG book, but there's something about those scenes that just bothers me, although I can't place a finger on it. Maybe it's the lack of emotional consequences on others? Hrm. And Salvatore doesn't yet have a handle on disposing of characters memorably - a scarred bounty hunter tracking Drizzt strangles a secondary character who's been about over the course of the book - he was the elf keeping an eye on Drizzt as he learned to forage for himself in the wilderness and how to survive a winter - and ... that's it. That's the last he's mentioned. No account of how the rest of his band reacted, nobody even thinking "Hey, I wonder what happened to that elf?" A somewhat sympathetic character is murdered and nobody notices?

And the climax, such as it was, of the bounty-hunter part of the story is terribly lame. This guy who's hunted Drizzt for years, vowing revenge and inciting other, bigger, enemies to attack him, who follows him to the (almost literal) ends of the earth, then gets beaten up by Drizzt[2] and ... leaves town. Bzuh? I know that Salvatore wanted to show Drizzt not killing him as a moral characteristic, but this would have been the perfect moment for a Disney villain death, where the villain rants and raves and falls off a cliff[3], so he's thoroughly dead and it's not the fault of the hero, who probably threw himself after the falling villain in a futile attempt to save him. Or even show the villain leaving, threatening to form a larger lynch mob posse and hunt him down. Instead, we get an out-of-character event that makes no sense, and Drizzt sees a wagon leave town a few days later and muses that the bounty hunter is on it. ANTI-CLIMACTIC.

There was, however, humor in the book! Actual funny humor! Drizzt travels, and since nobody else will trust him and let them travel with him, he ends up with this group of mendicant monk-type guys who believe in self-flagellation and punishment who have a tendency to throw themselves in front of him and hope that his powerful evil true drow nature will manifest so he'll kill them.

The book, however, does have my One True Pet Peeve when it comes to medieval societies - the group wanders into a town and buys a horse. Uh, yeah. Do you normally carry the cost of a car on you? Because that's the rough equivalent. OKAY so they'd just robbed a dragon and had the money, but I really highly doubt that any random village that doesn't currently have a horse-market is going to happen to have a horse ready for sale. :/


One day, I promise, I'll get to the gender and racial politics in the drow. One day. But I'm sleepy now and am going to crash soon. So there. :P

ETA: Oh yeah: the bits of the story that I liked were about Drizzt, having ventured onto the surface world for the first time in his life,[4] learning to deal with the winter, surviving, and so on. But I love Guy Learns Stuff and Guy Builds Stuff books.

Also, when writing in a fantasy world, you should be REALLY careful with your metaphors. Drizzt is secretly watching a (DOOMED TO BE KILLED BY MONSTERS[5]) human family in the beginning, and Salvatore refers to one of the children as an imp at one point, which gave me a severe case of mental whiplash until I realized it was a metaphor, not an actual imp running around with the other boys.




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[0] Streams of Silver, second paragraph. GAH. A master of prose you are not, Mr Salvatore.

[1] And thank God for that.

[2] Mr Salvatore, a number of heavy blows to the temple from the hilt of a scimitar SHOULD HAVE KILLED HIM THOROUGHLY INSTEAD OF JUST SENDING HIM UNCONSCIOUS. My suspension of disbelief can only go so far! I have to pretend that he actually died, that Drizzt hallucinated he was still breathing, and that the dwarf told him the bounty hunter left on the next wagon out in order to spare his fragile psyche!

[3] They were even fighting on a mountain path! Plenty of opportunity to fall off!

[4] The Forgotten Realms world is totally honeycombed with huge networks of caverns deep under the earth that support massiv epoplulations of creatures. There really ought to be way more sinkholes.

[5] Drizzt gets to be emo about that for years.

Comments

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Good point about the horse... except that in a world where there all these roving adventurers with disposable income, clearly there is a larger market for horses than in actual medieval Europe. So if I wave my hands fast enough I can justify every random village having at least one spare horse for sale (possibly left by the last adventurer who happened to die messily nearby), and with the horses being more of a commodity item the price would be lower than you might expect. And when the horses get too old or infirm to pawn off on even the dumber adventurers, they turn them into iron rations!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure how the dragons in this world amass so much wealth, because the entire economy appears to be based on rampaging monsters, and paying other people to take care of them, and nobody farms or does anything to generate that wealth in the first place. Oh, a farm was mentioned once, but it seemed to be surrounded by woods instead of fields, and there's the occasional merchant caravan trundling along, but I think they're just importing and exporting monsters.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

Tolkien rarely mentions agriculture except in the Shire (at least I think this is true - it's been a while since I've read LotR). However, a lot of people seem to miss the fact that most of the time in his books is spent in a mostly-wilderness area in between the settled parts of the continent, which also accounts for why the Fellowship is not constantly passing through villages. When this is imitated without the heavily-settled areas, it doesn't work.

I'm now kinda curious to find a copy of the Forgotten Realms boxed set to see if they actually discuss the economy in a sensible way and Salvatore was simply ignoring it, or if it's all really that dumb.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I never figured I'd be one for harping on the economy of a fictional world, but I think it might, aside from Drizzt's lavender orbs, the thing that annoys me the most.

They don't (Salvatore doesn't?) seem to have a particularly consistent valuation of gold and jewels, as far as I can tell. Although I will say it was clever that the dragon Drizzt encountered in Sojourn apparently amassed a lot of his wealth by charging merchants and others for smelting services using his fire-breath. XD

The ecology is seriously stupid, though. Areas that shouldn't be heavily populated with large predators are overrun with tundra yeti and ice-worms and who knows what-all. The Underdark (ok, I admit I like the name) is chock-full of dark dwarves, drow, goblins, mind flayers, etc. etc. and as far as I can teall, all they eat is mushrooms and each other.

[puddingcat.livejournal.com]

"Drizzt flashed his lavender orbs" makes me think he dropped his trousers while standing on a chilly mountainside.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

EXACTLY

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

A traditional Forgotten Realms marching song:

We see the drow have violet balls
Halflings' are brown but very small
Derros' are used like boleros
And elf lords have no balls at all.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

And now you understand the stoicness of our stoic friend :p.

Btw, I think Sojourn is by far the best book out of the slew. It gets worse, far worse, the more you go on.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm less than a hundred pages into Streams of Silver, and it seems like someone told Salvatore he should put more women into the books, so he added a street-savvy Finder of Things who immediately tries to defraud the group, a blowsy prostitute, and gets Cattie-brie tied up and terrorized, then sends her off on a wagon train to warn the others of a ruthless assassin who would (and quite obviously to any sensible person), be traveling after the group far faster than she ever could. WAY TO GO, DUDE.

I am also left wondering why said assassin didn't bother to kill her, now that she could identify him, when he showed no reluctance to kill anyone else.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

Oooooh, Entreri....He is fail as an assassin for the whole series. However, I kinda like it when he and Jarlaxle end up together in a cozy, domestic sort of relationshiop. In fact, I could tell you have his story arc ends, but I think I will save you that.


As far as women go, I suspect that RAS doesn't mean to be an idiot, but rather has only talked to at length with one female in his whole life, that being his wife, as every woman, ever, in any of his series, FR or otherwise, is the exact same character. It takes, I think, 23 books (maybe a little less, I don't know what number The Orc King is, but it's been twenty years since the series started and that's the latest Drizzt offering) for Catti-brie to get interesting, not even cool, but interesting. And she has so much potential for cool and I'm a little pissed that what RAS is setting up didn't happen sooner, because well, it's an RPG party and they are missing a major character type and just now, he's adding one.....I don't want to spoil....so I'll stop mid-rant. Anyway, totally hear you about the women. Although, as far as drow go, I think The War of the Spider Queen is much better at presenting them not so much as evil but self-serving bastards who love being self-serving bastards. I kinda like them better in that version, because god forbid that FR have, yanno, consistency.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

That sounds about right. XD I'm actually loving this reading project in that trainwreck kind of way, because I'm learning so much about writing. Not really in that "learn something I didn't know" kind of way, more in that I'm able to articulate much better why something is making the story fall apart on several levels.

And your mention of the party reminds me of another small rant I've had about books obviously based on RPG-type dynamics (although not tie-in novels). I totally get that in a game and in a book based on that game, according to the player mechanics, you'd want to have a well-rounded party so that you have the best chance of surviving what the GM/the gods/the author throws at you. But in a non-tie-in book, I find it way more interesting to have a party made of disparate people who have to think their way out of situations and jury-rig solutions because they don't have a particular expertise.

If I was given a choice between a book whose adventuring party was made of a fighter, a magic-user, a paladin, a ranger, a thief, and a cleric, and a book whose adventuring party was made of three princesses, a thief, and a disgruntled accountant, I'd go for the latter every time. :D

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't remember you covering the fact that every female with power and/or authority in these books is an evil dominatrix...

[telophase.livejournal.com]

That's going to be in the drow gender rant. :D

One of those books may actually pass the Bechdel Test, thanks to evil matron scheming, but I have to go back and check if the conversations all eventually get 'round to Drizzt or not. They may.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think that, if Drizzt doesn't come up, his father does.

FR does actually have a non-evil (but still rather amoral) female drow...who also becomes an exile.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me that I was hit last night as I was falling asleep with the realization that none of the books I've read so far have a hint of romance in them*, and that it was kind of refreshing.




* Yeah, Cattie-brie flirts with Wulfgar a bit in The Crystal Shard and he completely fails to notice, but that's not quite the same. I suspect there shall be a bit more of that in later books, however.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

Can we stop to talk about the fact that her name is CATTI-BRIE. I mean, my god.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Catti-brie. Pasha Pook. Drizzt Do'Urden. SOMEONE NEEDS TO GIVE THESE PEOPLE A BABY NAME BOOK.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I think Pasha Pook is a great name.

...for a cat.

[puppleball.livejournal.com]

[4] The Forgotten Realms world is totally honeycombed with huge networks of caverns deep under the earth that support massive poplulations of creatures. There really ought to be way more sinkholes.

DnD 4 has done this. Lots of places now have parts of the Underdark exposed. Details I don't remember, I only looked at the new map this past Saturday.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

And high time, I say! :D

Can you bring some of your FR books to AFest? I've read the first Drizzt trilogy and the frist two of Salvatore's first trilogy - The Crystal Shard and Streams of Silver.

(Trade ya for my lenses XD)

[puppleball.livejournal.com]

I will go through my books as soon as I finish with this message and pull some for you. Remember I haven't read them since High School and will be going off half memories and back cover information. I will be sure to pick ones to make you twitch since it's so fun to watch!

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I can't wait! XD

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

My husband, who fucking loves these books, started with the second book (not Crystal Shard) and assured me they got less sexist and better as they continued. So!

He also insists there's no racism. At all. In perhaps any fantasy book ever. That was an interesting conversation. I think I got cover-the-card bingo.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

No racism? One of Streams of Silver's (the second book) subplots IS ENTIRELY ABOUT RACISM. Drizzt gets turned away from a city because he's a drow and is emo about it for a while, because he'd heard it was a place where people of all species and races could walk about freely and had been looking forward to going there! It's structured as a hit-you-on-the-head Racism Is Bad, Mmkay? lesson! Chapter 14, "Star Light, Star Bright."

Although that's not the racism that I was referring to earlier - it's a hell of a lot more insidious than that. :) (i.e., as in almost all fantasy that attempts to treat racism in a metaphorical way - the Other is characterized as monsters. White people get to be characterized as human, and PoC ge tto be monsters. Misunderstood monsters quite often, but still monsters.)

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

No, it's the insidious stuff he was arguing about. He just doesn't Get It, and my attempts to get him there are So Not Working. He's one of those "I don't see race" types.