And a last few notes...

[telophase]

On the Forgotten Realms reading project, I am one-third through Elaine Cunningham's Tangled Webs, which features a female drow. Who is just too damn normal, and the rest of the book is just too damn boring. OK, yeah, I missed the book that's her origin story so perhaps I missed a spectacular transformation from a whip-wielding evil dominatrix* to this sort of boring normal woman who happens to have pitch-black skin and white hair. And whose author handwaves the canon that drow are evil so everyone's supposed to be wary and frightened of them by having an entire shipful of sailors accept her for who she is with little drama. Well, all people who are her enemies are terrified of drow, and all her friends are easily accepting. Convenient, that.

The cover of the book also has a squidheaded illithid with a rather large rack shooting lightning at a dark green woman with white hair and really awful fashion sense standing and looking bored who I gather is supposed to be Our Drow Heroine. Never fear, there is a much better cover.

And for a novel subtitled "A Tale of the Underdark," there's an awful lot of not being in the Underdark (the subterranean realm where the darker races live) so far.

I still owe you the drow sexism/racism rant, I haven't forgotten. I'm just trying to figure out how to say it and if there's enough other than "Yeah, sexist and racist" to say.

I am also halfway through The Thousand Orcs (Forgotten Realms: The Hunter's Blades Trilogy, Book 1), which I picked up solely because the second book in this particular trilogy is titled The Lone Drow, which sounded delightfully emotastic. Unfortunately, it's a long slog getting there.

Let me explain the plot of The Thousand Orcs so far:

--A bunch of orcs attack some dwarves, for some reason I've forgotten. Possibly simply because they're orcs.
--There's some sort of dull politicking going on in a city in the mountains between frost giants, dwarves, and orcs.
--Bruenor Battlehammer, one of our previous heroes and now King of Mithril Hall, is leading a bunch of dwarves, Drizzzzt, Cattie-brie, Regis, Wulfgar, and a woman and child with absolutely no personalities that apparently Wulfgar ended up married to in one of the books I haven't yet read. Cattie-brie appears to be OK with this.
--Speaking of their destination, Mithril Hall has undergone a change, possibly prompted by the Tolkien estate, and is now Mithral Hall.
--Bruenor does some politicking of his on in the abovementioned city, which doesn't like Mithral Hall for some reason, probably because Mithral Hall dwarves can sell better stuff for cheaper, and sows a little dissent among the city dwarves.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains. A wagon falls off a cliff. Nobody is seriously hurt and nothing seems to happen.
--There is boring politicking among characters whose names and races I can't even keep apart.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains.
--They continue to wend their way through rocky mountains. Orcs poise to attack.
--There is boring politicking among characters whose names and races I can't even keep apart.
--Wulfgar's new wife is Deeply Understanding of Wulfgar's Deep Friendship with Cattie-brie and encourages him to go with her adventuring or fighting or something and not to worry about her and the child because she knows he'll come back when it's his time to come back. All said with a straight face and utmost sincerity, and with nothing spurring it on other than Wulfgar's looking at Cattie-brie. At least I don't recall them thinking about going off to adventure or fight or anything and at the moment, everybody in the entire wagon train is still expecting to head to the same place. I think I preferred Salvatore's other female type, the jealous one who smacks Wulfgar every other minute for looking at other women. At least there's some sort of personality there.
--The copy editor still hasn't learned the difference between "principle" and "principal".

It is entirely possible that something happened in amidst the rocky mountains, but I probably missed it, having fallen asleep on the journey.

And so to bed.

--

* Yes. Every female drow is a whip-wielding evil dominatrix. They get their whips when they come of age. No, really.

Comments

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Lirael, IIRC, is better in the first book. By the second, what's-his-name has taught her that you must be a generic nice girl if you want to be the lead in a fantasy novel and bag a cute guy. By the third book, she will understand that even having a stray unkind thought will cost you the cute guy. And yet, I still prefer these to Arilyn's books. I think because Lirael starts out with more potential. Also, she likes (in the first book) sex, and feels no shame about that. Mind you, when this book came out, I was 15-16, and had an extremely different perspective regarding the romantic relationship (though I think that worked better when Cunningham would forget they were paired, instead of just friends). Actually, it's entirely possible that it contributed to my current attitude towards fiction and females being "good enough." (I think I was also still recovering from C.S. Lewis telling me that all boys got to go to heaven, but girls who grew up didn't in the Narnia books.)

I think you missed a lot of the painful stuff with Drizz't/Wulfgar/Cattie-Brie. Maybe it's in the book I sent you.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

The non-romantic relationship between the drow and the berserker is kind of nifty in this second book, although I'd prefer it if she were more prickly or anything other than Generic Nice Girl. I'd gathered they had the previous relationship, as it was mentioned in passing at one point which was both good and bad in a way: it deflated the idea that men and women can be good friends without having any sort of romantic relationship, but OTOH, it was nice to see exes working together as good friends, which is also a rarity.

I read the introduction ostensibly by Drizzt in the one you sent, since it arrived yesterday. Wulgar's thought to be dead, and Drizzt and Cattie-brie are heading off to adventure somewhere and presumably flirt more try to get over the loss.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

The second book, sadly, is the only time where the relationship isn't romantic. The first and third have "must be generic good girl to please the guy" elements, and it's very much Great Love in the third.

Ok, yeah, that should be where the really romantic stuff kicks off.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

Didn't like Cunningham's Liriel Baenre stuff so much. Baenres should be evil and they should be gleeful.

Erm, there is nothing, absolutely nothing worth reading in the Hunter's Blade trilogy. I mean it. There are orcs, and then there are some dead orcs....and then some more dead orcs....and then some more....and then...just skip to "The Pirate King" which made me laugh out loud.

Btw, did you see RAS has written a young adult novel? NOW THAT IS WORTH THE READING FOR ALL THE AWFUL...ahem...I haven't laughed that hard in awhile. I even reviewed it. I never review things.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I can accept changing from evil to good, as the conceit that one entire race all unthinkingly devotes itself to one moral code is just stupid*, but the idea that someone would grow up in this poisonous atmosphere and yet be able to function normally in a normal world is just ridiculous.

I think what I failed to note above is that RAS's writing has, by this book, improved to the point where I'm not constantly tripping over clumsy phrases and all, but I'd actually welcome some awful writing at this point, because this book is full of boring.

Btw, did you see RAS has written a young adult novel?

I'd vaguely heard something of the sort. I'll have to check it out. XD




* I will allow for it, however, if it can be shown that it's artificially induced.

[darkelf105.livejournal.com]

the conceit that one entire race all unthinkingly devotes itself to one moral code is just stupid

Hmmm, I think the whole premise of races that are wholly evil are silly and D&D dropped the ball with that (hence all the backpedaling in the Hunter's Blade Trilogy in which orcs aren't all evil but the sake of story continuity and whatnot we'll continue to slaughter them in grand genocidal fashion anyways...). I've always been bothered by hey! it's a goblin, it deserves to die because it raids villages and is EVIL...except that, well, if you look at things like insider/outsider relations, the problem of the Other in society, and class structures, goblins would raid because they have been marginalized and have the least available resources and thus are driven in a situational context to "evil" or more like survival. But D&D players and writers pretty much overlook this bit of inadvertant world building they've done and just say it's because the "monster races" (even though they have distinct culture and languages) are feral, vicious and stupid so it's okay to slaughter them willy-nilly. Clearly the question of good and evil in these works has been posited by a brain-dead squirrel and answered by it's retarded third cousin.

The drow race is kinda the only exception. Lloth sorta made a false (mostly-closed) system and the drow themselves are pretty much unrepentant about how they live and how their society works...which is why I don't really like the concept of good drow. The Forgotten Realms is really, really inconsistent but in the War of the Spider Queen, readers are pretty much told hey the drow are the way the are and they like and are aware of it. Which makes it a whole different sort of drow then the ones in either the Drizzt books or the Liriel Baenre books in which the drow stupidly adn blindly follow Lloth's moral code. But they twist their system as much as any group would twist a normative moral code and I think that it works in that they are underground and don't have to deal with the rest of their world. Their environment would be poisonous to those that couldn't use the system, but take out all of the weird Spider Goddess stuff and their city resembles any city that works on intrigue, betrayal and murder, the dark elves are just a little bit more upfront about it.

[akaihyo.livejournal.com]

Yes, a classic flaw of D&D (and fantasy games in general) is that you have to have baddies to defeat (i.e. kill) and it is easier to handwave it as "it is OK they are all evil anyway". Makes the genocide so much more palatable, don'cha know?

Some of my favorite memories of one D&D campaign was arguing over if goblins had souls and if we had the right to just kill them out of hand. I was arguing the "Yes, they have souls and should be turned to the light" side of the debate, it was quite fun.

Sadly, 4th Edition D&D is back to the "kill monsters, take stuff" vein of games so all goblins, orcs, etc are just evil and need to be killed. *sigh*