Forgotten Realms

[telophase]

I'm still continuing the project of reading Forgotten Realms books and snarking at them - it's just that I got mired down in one that has nothing to recommend it whatsoever. It's one of the ones lent me by puppleball, Book Two of The Harpers, Elfshadow, featuring everyone's second favorite Mary Sue, Arilyn Moonblade.

Despite it being book 2 in a series[1], I believe Arilyn is introduced in this one, judging by her origin story, included at the beginning. Which I've mostly forgotten. She's a half-elf, depicted on the cover as a human with pointy ears, lots of eyeliner, and moussed hair. And, now that I look at it, a tunic that looks as if it's made of satin and sewed on the wrong setting so that the stitches up the side and along the hem are pulling badly. Artists! Learn not to use models dressed in cheap satin outfits!

ETA: She also has eyes and ears on totally different levels, and her left ear is about 3/4 the size of the right. I think the artist was on a pretty tight deadline painting this. And he also used either himself or one of his gaming buddies to pose for the dissolute nobleman character, who looks more like a linebacker than a fencer and is sporting a rather shiny mullet.

And to continue the cover snark because I'm on a roll, if you click on the Amazon link above (which I hope you do, because it adds to my click-through report :D), you can see the cover I'm looking at. Note how the stocky nobleman is holding a rapier that has the smallest hilt evar, so small that his hand entirely obscures it (or it's surgically attached to his hand and runs up his arm) and how Arilyn is holding a sword whose hilt is so short that her right hand is forced to partially cover the moonstone on the end of it.[2] Which is an important plot device by the way - the stone, I mean. You just can't control a sword that big with a hilt that small, IMHO. (SCAers, feel free to jump in and argue if I'm wrong.)

She also has no scabbard for it. She's got a thin leather belt it's meant to be on, obviously, but a scabbard for a sword that size should be visible behind her cloak.

Anyway, I have to spent a lot of time ridiculing the cover because the interior is just so damn boring. There are no particularly sympathetic characters. The blond man on the cover is an agent sent to protect her (unbeknownst to her), whose cover is that of a dissolute nobleman. I take it that he's supposed to be somewhat charming, because Arilyn hasn't yet skewered him and wonders herself why she hasn't, but he mostly comes across as a nerdy 14-year-old boy's idea of what a charming rogue should be.

Given the potential audience for this book, I can't say that's necessarily the wrong choice.

For rachelmanija, the especially gawdawful name in this: Cherbill Nimmt.

Ummmm...plot? OK, so Arilyn is the half-elf daughter of some totally awesome elven fighting conveniently dead mother, and has inherited her sword, the moonblade, which has some sort of speshul powers that I can't actually remember. She's being targeted by an assassin who's using the symbol of the Harpers to mark his/her victims, and is also suspected of being the assassin herself.

And she's also got a rep as a totally awesome assassin, except that she doesn't kill the innocent, because her moonblade won't let her, and she always gives her targets a fair chance because you can't have an amoral character as the hero she's Lawful Good or some such. Someone I've forgotten sends Danilo, the protector disgused as a dissolute nobleman, after her for some reason I can't remember, and stuff happens that I can't remember and the assassin seems to be closing in on them and a thoroughly unlikable elf who is at least supposed to be thoroughly unlikable has shown up and is trying to hit on Arilyn for some as yet undisclosed reason and there's been a bunch of boring random monster encounters I've mostly forgotten and the entire damn thing is Totally. Forgettable.

I have no idea if I'll finish it. Never fear, I have many more! As I sad earlier, puppleball has loaned me several, and when I sold books back to Half-Price Books in College Station this weekend, I discovered that it was a treasure trove of Forgotten Realms books and laid my hands on several more. I'm currently halfway through The Halfling's Gem by Salvatore, and while he has many, many sins, it seems that boredom, at least, is not among them.


--

[1] Looking it up on Amazon, I see that the book was rebranded and republished as Book 1 of a series called Songs and Swords. I gather that The Harpers was meant to be a collection of mostly-standalones having to do with, naturally, harpers.

[2] Guess it's a hand-and-a-half sword then, huh? Ba-dump-bump-CHING! (A little - very little - sword-related humor there, folks.)

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Oh, Arilyn. You know, I was neutral on these back when I liked FR. I shudder to think about reading them now.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

There's nothing particularly about her character that appeals to me. I don't mind reading about Drizzzzzt, because the type appeals to me, although this particular execution doesn't. But with Arilyn, she's just ... dull.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

*nods*

That was kind of the thing. Mind you, I suspect that when the book first came out, a female fighter lead in the line was different wnough to compensate, but now...

I suspect her other series will hold up better, though still not be great. Lirael had more interesting things going on around her and a less generic (slightly) plot.

I think Arilyn's books also get worse when it gets to the romantic element later on.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I suspect you're right about Arilyn being a new kind of lead. She's not a rape-and-revenge heroine, which was a huge chunk of the female fighting leads in 1991, and I might have enjoyed that at the time. I know I'd have liked that she was wearing a sensible outfit on the cover, even though it's Generic Medievalesque, because of the plethora of chainmail bikinis and the like.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

And I read them...probably around 95-98, so she still would have been something of an exception.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

I had this out from the library just recently! I kept wandering into tanaise's room to read her the particularly hilarious lines, until she kicked me out. Then I started texting them. Good times, good times.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

(My favorite bit was how everything stopped every time you met a new character so you could get the rundown of their entire inventory.)

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Heee! I'll have to watch for that! XD

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

You are totally right about the 'forgettable' part, because I didn't recognize this book at all until I clicked to look at the cover and realized that I actually owned it once...and now I definitely remember reading it, too...and yet nothing in the summary is ringing a bell. It's a book that completely dissolves into nothing the moment it hits the brain.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I just read another scene from it, and I can feel it slipping away from my mind...

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

Ahaha. Like others have said I didn't recognize it at all until I clicked and saw the cover. The sucker is sitting on my shelf! I remember trying to read it. I think a friend got it for me because my biggest complaint with the Drizzt books was the lack of girls.

[affreca.livejournal.com]

I'm amazed at the level of detail in the bad costuming on the front. Who would bother to put badly sewn seams on cover art. And it looks like his tabard is made of quilting fabric.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming that the artist doesn't costume himself, and didn't know any better, *and* that he knew he needed to put detail into the picture in those areas to make the fabric seem real. Only he put the wrong detail in. It makes me want to rip it off her and re-sew it.

[lady-noremon.livejournal.com]

I totally understand about a book that you keep forgetting parts about while reading. "Heart of Darkness" made me read it 3 times D:

I really love that guys mullet, his outfit, and his scabbard btw.

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

If you can find it, one of the Harper books, "Soldiers of Ice", actually isn't too bad. I mean, I'm sure you'll find stuff to ridicule -- like the fact that gnomes apparently have to wear a suit of spiked full plate to clear badgers out of their warrens -- but the book makes a good point about common humanity (or in this case humanoidity), and the author's willing to kill characters -- most of whom aren't all good or all bad.

It's a refreshing change.

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

Also? Heroine who isn't "incredibly beautiful," actually has functioning dress sense, and so far as I recall, is not at all a Mary Sue.

http://www.o-love.net/realms/covers_large/pic_har7.jpg

Oh, and I'll mail the money order tomorrow (sorry, classes have been keeping me away from the post office.)

[chomiji]

Migawd, that's an awful painting. The really weird thing is that he's good at rendering - there are some textures in the fabrics that are done better than I ever could - and totally clueless about anatomical proportion and how to handle it through different poses. Take a life drawing class, dude, please - or at least buy one of those books on Painting the Human Figure! Look at their legs: if either one straightened the bent leg, it would be several inches longer than the other one. And their non-bent legs are short and stubby. In fact, they're proportioned like little kids or dwarves - she's maybe 5.5 heads tall. And does she actually have feet under the lettering? She seems to be growing out of the coveniently-placed rock.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

No! Neither one of them have feet! They are caught in the midst of springing, Son Goku-like, from the bosom of Mother Earth!

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I suppose Cherbill Nimmt is a thief?

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I've forgotten.

Which is about par for the course with this book.