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mimiplaysgames · 6 years

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A Rush of Blood to the Head (2/6)

Pairing: Terra/Aqua Rating: T Word Count: 4,951

Summary: Aqua was told it was a fair trade - her life for his. And it was, but now Terra has to pick up after the consequences.

AO3 FF.net

A/N: It’s such a weird feeling to end a WIP. This is the third one I’ve opened, and the first one I’ve closed. I usually daydream about them until I put them into words. The outline had been collecting dust for a couple of months. After I’ve dusted it off, I decided not to change anything. Needless to say, I’ve been very excited to finally share this. I almost consider this as an AU to my other AU, with all the same headcanons and backstories for them that I’ve written out.

The reunion was done to Michael Giacchino’s “Locke’d Out Again” from Lost Season One. The Wayfinder scene was done to Michael Giacchino’s “Departing Sun” from Lost Season One. The second flashback to the end was done to Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Home” from The Last of Us.

One Gain

The only thing that would have made this night better would be moving closer to her. But asking for her permission to do so was a risk Terra never took.

The rain continued to patter heavily on the windows, and every once in a while lightning struck again. The lamp next to Aqua had been lit, and they rested the heavy leather book in between the both of them, a blanket draped over their laps. The rest of the lounge, a mixture of furniture, long desks, shelves of books and a wardrobe, was completely draped in shadows. She was close enough that her leg rested against his.

For now, he was grateful to relish her proximity. He also felt safest when he made it difficult for her to determine his feelings for her, fearful of how she would react if she ever found out.

“Ghosts will stay behind for any number of reasons. They may need to take care of unfinished business, or they could be in denial over their deaths,” Terra said, summarizing most of the chapter he had been reading.

Aqua rested her elbow on the backrest of the loveseat they were sharing, her head on her palm. She yawned. “That doesn’t sound so bad. When does it get dangerous?” she asked, rubbing her eyes.

“They can haunt people if they are angry or resentful.” He wondered if there would ever be a point in his future career as a Keyblade Master that he would encounter one. “They can even get aggressive if they are enraged, or vengeful, or even possessive.”

She scoffed. “And the writer of this book came across enough of them to know this?”

His lips curled ever so slightly upward. “Did you know there is a world out there where there are undead pirates? It’s true. There was an earlier chapter about them.”

She rolled her eyes. “That’s not the same thing as a ghost. How do you actually know you came across one?”

He pointed to some lines in the book and read aloud: “A ghost, upon contact, will carry burdens and confounded memories of the life left behind. When one speaks, the manner will be cold, and their sentences garbled. A ghost will talk nonsense, leaving the living confused. It is a way to make certain that personal pain is felt by those left behind.“

“That’s horribly depressing.” She stifled a laugh rather poorly, which was usual. She always made fun of him for finding the strangest things to read from the library. But she never refused to listen to him talk about it.

“It gets worse.” It was fascinating, but heavy-hearted at the same time. “Sometimes the living can keep a dangerous ghost around because they get obsessed with their loss. Like, they’ll keep objects that used to belong to their loved ones with them at all times.”

“Ugh, Terra-”

“Hey, you never know. You might need this information.”

“Of course,” she said, her eyes fluttering shut. “Someday we’ll need to attempt a heroic rescue over some old lady who didn’t know she died.” Her voice cracked.

“You’re very tired.” He mustered every ounce of his will to stop himself from sounding disappointed, expecting she’ll leave him for bed.

She slowly opened her eyes, the dim lighting from the lamp on his side reflecting off of them. They stared into his for a while. “Yeah.” She actually sounded discouraged over her own tiredness, and it was a lie if Terra pretended that his heart didn’t flutter in that instant.

Still, he shouldn’t be too forward. “Should I carry you to your room? Or do you want to camp out here like we used to do during the snowstorms?”

“First of all,” she said, smacking him on the bicep, “I can take myself back to my room... But yeah, let’s camp here.”

It was the better answer. The lounge was one of the several rooms they’ve christened as spots for blanket and pillow forts when they were children. Inside the wardrobe were a heap of stacked blankets. They spread them out and layered them right in front of the tall windows - enough to makeshift a spacious bed.

The rain wasn’t letting up anytime soon. Each time lightning flashed, it illuminated her silhouette, the way her chopped hair fell around her face. Most days, Terra was able to handle his ache to touch her just fine.

Tonight, he snuck behind her in some feeble attempt to scare her. As expected, her reflex to defend herself kicked in - she sent an elbow straight back, which he grabbed. She laughed, her other hand right on his as he wrapped his free arm around her waist. She never seemed to learn that tackling him using just physical strength was always futile. Being this close to her, he could faintly smell notes of vanilla and lavender. He threw her onto the blankets, her laugh the sweetest sound next to the rain.

The sky was painted in shades of bright oranges and deep pinks. Sunsets in Twilight Town seemed to make the sandstone that shaped the architecture stand out all the more.

To see light again - after what apparently had been thirteen years of pure darkness, with nothing to see or touch - was an indescribable feeling.

Hearing voices that weren’t Xehanort’s took a few days to accept. The smell of food was overwhelming. The sights were unbelievable. He had spent such long hours in darkness with nothing but repeating memories and dreams. Anything he saw in his mind those years was probably warped. Seeing color again made him weep with happiness for the first several hours. Best of all, there was no Xehanort left to speak of - at least not speaking to him in his head.

But that was the biggest problem. He woke up, and didn’t understand why or remember what led to it. He was left to die in the middle of a desert, with four furry legs and an inability to walk properly. He was saved by a talking meerkat and warthog who took him to an oasis. It was there he met a young lion by the name of Sora. It didn’t take long for him to meet others, like his most esteemed successor, Riku.

Terra would describe the two of them as saviors. They helped him retrieve his armor and his Keyblade. Kept him up to date with all of the latest happenings. Listened to him when he briefly spoke about his past. But it had been two days since Riku came back from the Realm of Darkness, from a mission to find her. Avoiding Terra was such an understatement to describe how often he refused to answer calls.

That left Terra on guard duty in this quiet, peaceful town, checking the communicator they gave him every five minutes to see if Riku had finally replied. He listed every possible reason why he was awake in the first place.

He also replayed memories to himself, since he had no friends to share them with. Sneaking notes to Ventus during their study time, unable to stifle giggles. Ventus would write back to him the worst puns. Aqua sat right by him, her brow twitching every time they laughed as she glued her nose to a book. Until she grabbed the essay she was writing and smacked Terra right on the head, begging for some peace and quiet.

She was the same as him, though - she failed to contain a giggle of her own. They spent their entire childhoods with endless teasing like this - it was the easiest way to get her attention. When he got older, he wanted more from her, attention that was different than what he was used to. It was possible that he probably could have received it if he had asked. But old habits just didn’t break.

To think that was thirteen years ago, and he spent those last few moments they had together by shutting the both of them out, going out on his own, and hiding a bunch of truths he should have, could have, and would have shared with them. He could have been sharing this beautiful sunset-lit view with them now.

I didn’t even congratulate her for becoming a Master. I’ve ruined us.

He walked through the streets of Twilight Town, and checked his communicator again. Nothing. The buildings were tall, and it looked like magic was at work with the way the sun seemed to brighten every angle. Except for a hooded figure. So black was the cloak that it stood out like a mess of paint.

The hooded figure, a woman, saw that he noticed her, and bolted straight toward the forest outside of town.

“Hey!” He sprinted, following her into the trees, away from the ears of any civilian. She was lithe in her movements, almost floating in a way, using shadows to make her fly faster, to make her jump higher, to help her speed.

They reached a clearing, some decent patches of grass where thick tree trunks wouldn’t get in the way. She stopped and faced him, her hands melting into cascades of ever flowing shadows that seeped out from her long sleeves. Until they thinned out and hardened. He summoned his Keyblade, and she whipped.

The Master usually said that Terra excelled in staring down his opponents. In facing them with bravery. In analyzing their skills and preparing accordingly. The woman was a mage, a sorceress that utilized shadows that were able to bend to whatever she wanted them to be. She floated in the air, using mainly her whips for offense, at times trying to grab him. Not once did she say a word.

There were only two things that Terra needed to keep in mind: do not fall to his knees, and do not keep his eyes away from his enemies.

Most of the fight was just a flurry of strikes that were blocked by others. But it was her dodging that gave him the first sense of unsettling dejá vu. He moved to slam her with his Keyblade, and she maneuvered a handless cartwheel to her left. A twirl here. A backflip there. Each dodge an opportunity she took to sneak up on him later. But each one was something he almost expected.

What hurt the most were his obliques. He gripped them as leaned onto his Keyblade. At least he wasn’t thrown down.

He waited for an opportunity to hit, and it looked like she waited for the same. The smoky shadows that kept pouring out of her long black sleeves still formed those annoying whips, but she kept them close to herself.

The woman made the next move. She flailed her right arm first before closely following it with her left. Terra maintained his defensive stance, blocking each strike as she continued to wail at him. He could feel that he was getting a bit more sluggish every second. So he darted the next strike and sprinted at her with all his might, raising the incredibly heavy Ends of the Earth to hit her as hard as he could.

She dodged, and dodged again. He stopped, and there they waited. Again, there was that itching feeling in the pit of his stomach. Something about the way she was moving. It was acrobatic. It happened at all the exact moments that never left him surprised.

He kept his Keyblade close and he breathed hard. What was worse than being this injured and fighting a new enemy this powerful was the thought that was threatening to leave his mouth.

And he didn’t have the strength to keep it in. “Aqua?”

The shadows didn’t exactly dissipate. They crawled right back into her sleeves, gloved hands forming in replacement. She started to remove the hood that was hiding her face.

The hand that held his Keyblade became weak. It felt like his face went cold, and he might as well be floating in the air since he forgot the pain he was under. Her hair had gone mostly white, save for the roots which were still blue. Her eyes were bright as always, but instead of bearing that enamoring azure color he kept a memory of all these years, they were amber. And they were furious.

All at once, Terra forgot he was breathing. He slowly walked forward, holding his hand out, but stopped himself short from touching her. She stood still, the look of wrath never wavering.

“I don’t understa-” He choked on a sob, and willed himself to hold it back.

She smacked her lips, and took a moment to respond. Her expression was fully unnatural for her.

“You understand exactly who you’re looking at,” she said with a low voice, but with an intensity that told him she was ready to strike again.

Of course he knew. He was looking at a parasite, during its gestation. It almost felt like he was going to faint, his face losing all feeling. “Why?”

There were small micro twitches throughout her face - her nose, her mouth, her eyes. As if she was enraged by the question and tried her hardest to contain it.

After what felt like forever of her staring at him this way, she asked, “did you ever think of me all these years? Just once?”

Terra let out a harsh gasp. “Of course I did!”

She breathed in slowly. “Then what was I doing, sitting in the dark all by myself this entire time? Hm?” She cocked her head at that last hm? But he had no proper answer.

Then she said, in a softer voice, “were the worlds safe the entire time I was gone? Was there a point to any of it?”

He shook his head slowly. His eyes burned and his throat constricted.

“And what were you thinking when you left us there to chase you around world-to-world?” she continued, her jaw quivering. “What was going through your head when you refused to come home?”

Again, he had no answer. She straightened her head, and strange sense of calm washed over all the movements that flooded her face before.

“You’ve ruined us,” she said.

Terra slowly dropped to his knees, leaning on his Keyblade. He stared at the ground.

“I know,” he said, failing to keep his voice steady. “Everything is broken, and I don’t know how to put it back together.”

He took in two breaths. She must been staring at him, because she didn’t move. He told himself to keep it together before speaking again. It was breathy, the way he said it. But it was the most strength he had.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you when you needed me.”

No answer. He willed himself to look at her, even though he was terrified of what he would see. Her brows were slanted harsher than before, her lips so pursed that she must have been grinding her teeth. Aqua never used to get this angry.

If this was the most frightening she would get, then the only terror left to face was to tell her the truth. As crazy as it was. All these years of saying nothing, though, only to hit him back where it hurt the most.

“I’m sorry I never told you earlier,” he said, his voice surprisingly calmer like he was ready for the execution. He felt his eyes soften, but he refused to cry. “I love you.”

Her eyes quivered and they watered. Her mouth relaxed into a the beginning of shock as her eyes went wider.

He prepared for an attack, but then her face changed. It became... cold almost, and her eyes glassed over, almost like she suddenly became a different person. She reached her hand into her pocket, and threw something so hard that it told him she hated him. It hit him in shoulder, and bounced onto the dirt.

Her bright blue Wayfinder.

Fair enough. She slowly turned to walk away, leaving him and his unsteady breaths.

What to say to make her stay?

“What about Ven?” he called out. There was no way she would abandon him. No way she would put him in danger.

She stopped, but refused to face him. It took way too long for her to reply, and it was impossible to read what she was feeling through her voice. “I don’t... need you to find him.”

Aqua kept going, disappearing into the trees. For the moment, Terra didn’t feel much of anything. It seemed that his body responded by simply denying everything he had seen. He eyed the Wayfinder, the only spark of blue that is among this forest baked in sunlight.

The sound of crumpling leaves and twigs crept up behind him. “She dealt a stronger resistance than you did,” said a voice that was soft, but only mock-pleasantly so. “Either way, her ability to continually struggle with it usually turned toward our favor.”

It was a young man, seemingly younger than Terra, with white hair, dark skin, and bright yellow eyes. There was no denying who this was. Xehanort, but a teenage version of him. How this was possible was beyond Terra’s understanding - not that he was able to mull over the reasons right now. The shock of seeing such a face nearly put him in a stupor.

This Xehanort smiled - it was a smile that oozed superiority, and it was perpetually different from the way an older Xehanort would have done it. The Master was practiced in pretending. This one still had a long way to go.

Terra only stared at him. This Xehanort wasn’t the one who told him continually, all these years, how he was good for nothing. That it was all his fault. That there was no one in the world who wanted him around. Still, it didn’t matter.

“What are you talking about?” Terra said, trying hard to keep his voice steady. There was no way he was going to give this bastard the benefit of hearing him in pain.

Xehanort maintained a smile. “She isn’t as frantic about resisting it as you were. On some level, part of her desired it. I believe most of it was due to the fact that she can now remember what it is like to feel again, and that she is free to roam where ever she may please.”

Terra let out a scoff that melted into a laugh. “Just shut up,” he said calmly. “She would never have-”

“But she did.” A glisten in the eyes, like rubbing salt on a wound. “She traded herself, for you.”

Terra held his breath. He shook his head, very quickly, and didn’t allow himself to gasp.

“You were a liability,” Xehanort continued. “We thus sought a more proper candidate who was primed for the responsibility.” He crossed his arms, his smile widening just a bit more. “I don’t believe she understood exactly what she was getting herself into.”

“You took everything from me.” Terra’s voice shook now. He hated himself for it, and he gripped the handle of his Keyblade so hard that his knuckles turned white. Eraqus was dead. Ventus was still missing. Now Aqua was taken.

Xehanort pretended not to hear it. “So much unspoken and forgotten emotion. This made her much easier to manipulate than-”

Terra lunged at him, the latter summoning a Keyblade that was unrecognizable. Another mage, just like the old man, but much more temporal. Much more willing to let himself be distracted by anger.

And without a foreign will to bend the mind, Terra was free to let loose any ounce of darkness he was still scarred with. It was like unlimited power, fed by a hatred so deep, Terra wished he could end him there - take the life of a teenager, and everything in time and space would reverse.

It left the young Xehanort disarmed and up against the trunk of a tree, with his shoulder lodged under Terra’s substantial Keyblade. Without magic, Xehanort was just as weak as any, unable to wrestle out of Terra’s grip.

“I’ll take her back,” Terra said, and this made Xehanort sneer through his nose.

The he heard her voice. “Let him go.”

She stood there, shadows snaking up along her cloak. She wasn’t in a stance to attack, but her voice demanded submission all the same.

Surrounded by two enemies now... although one of them was someone he would never fight again, knowing now who she was.

He turned to face Xehanort, and said, “the next you see me, you’ll be afraid.” His voice was so low, it was only meant to be heard by one person.

Terra ripped his Keyblade out of the trunk, and Xehanort stumbled a bit, breathing hard.

The least he could do was keep his eyes on the enemy - at her. She was still Aqua, maybe she would always be. But not right now.

She held his stare until her eyes started to tremble, and she was the first to break contact.

“We have work to do,” she said to Xehanort, before turning her back. The teenager didn’t look too pleased with her reaction, but he gripped his shoulder and followed suit.

They walked some distance, where another man in a cloak, who was fairly large and very tall, waited for them by a gateway made of shadow. This man also had white hair that was long enough to drape his shoulders. Most surprising was his face - Terra’s face. Aqua walked through the corridor without acknowledging this man, but the man followed her with his gaze, and it made Terra uncomfortable to witness. Xehanort also disappeared through the gateway, and the man eyed Terra one more time before going through himself.

Alone. A gentle breeze shook the leaves that still took refuge in the canopies. Terra realized he was still gripping his Keyblade with an iron will, but forcing himself to relax opened a dam of tears to pour from his eyes instead. He walked over to the blue Wayfinder, and fell on his knees when he tried to pick it up.

Terra let the tears fall, barely breathing. His chest hurt the most, and he told himself that he wouldn’t vomit.

He held the Wayfinder to his forehead. When was the last time she truly smiled at me?

The morning of the Mark of Mastery exam. They stood together, right before opening the back doors to the entrance hall. The sun shone so brightly through the windows. The mountains were still green from the summer season. She looked at him, and with two fingers, traced the shape of a smile on her lips. Her own followed, and whenever she smiled - when she was really happy - her eyes sparkled. He remembered smiling back, although it was lie to say he wasn’t nervous. They were silent. Then they graced each other with good lucks and shook hands. It was the last time he had ever touched her, as well.

Tears continued to drip. He stroked the Wayfinder with his thumb, his nose stuffed up.

Peculiarly, he felt a nub at the back of the trinket. He flipped it to see a tiny, rolled up piece of paper taped there. He gently unrolled it, careful not to destroy the beautiful details she poured her heart into the creation of this star-shaped charm. The scroll was tiny and narrow, and it had three lines.

The first - her handwriting, soft and elegant:

Find him. May your heart be your guiding key. You just need the right one.

The others - still hers, but they were scratchy, as if she was being tortured when she wrote them:

It cannot break.

It hurts so much.

Terra let out a breath, the last of his tears tracing his jawline. “I know it hurts,” he said out loud. “But you’re going to be okay. I’m going to fix this.”

With a refreshed bravado, Terra stood up quickly, and hustled back to the motel he was staying in. The sun was disappearing behind the horizon, and most of the sky was dark. He turned on only the bathroom light, so that the bedroom was illuminated by it and what remained of the sun. He placed the communicator on the dresser and made his way to the narrow standing mirror right by the windows.

He began to undo the clasp that held the string of her Wayfinder together.

A question she asked him a few weeks before their Mark of Mastery exam rang in his mind...

“Do you know what I would haunt you for, if I ever turned into a ghost?”

They laid next to each other that stormy night, on top of several blankets, with some pillows they took from the lounge sofas. She was on her side, facing him, while he opted to rest on his back. Close enough to touch each her, and damn, he wanted to.

He allowed a half-smile. “No, what?”

She rolled onto her back. “The fudge cake you rejected for your sixteenth birthday.”

“Oh please-”

“It had multiple layers-”

“I already apologized for that-“

“And I worked so hard on it-”

“It’s not that your baking is bad. Far from it. I just needed a change of diet.” He scoffed and added, “I still ate it, anyway.”

“I even put strawberries on top.” He could see in the dark that her smile was smug.

Terra snarled. “I’d haunt you for driving me crazy.”

She giggled and rolled back to face him. Her eyes were just as beautiful and bright at night. “But seriously though,” she said, “we should make a pact about this. And it should be a serious one.” She thought for a moment. “Hey, why did we stop making blood oaths?”

He laughed. “You forgot about that? We decided that it hurt too much to prick our fingers for everything single stupid thing. We were doing them for reasons like saving each other from being stuck on a tree.”

She snorted. “I think when you’re eight or nine, being stuck on a tree is a scary enough ordeal.”

“We still made pacts, though. We agreed to replace them with pinky shakes.” He smiled at her. “Don’t you remember? We said they meant just as much.”

“Okay then. Let’s promise to save each other’s souls if we ever turn into ghosts.” She held out her pinky finger. “What do you say?”

He gazed at her for a moment, and lightning struck. He wished he could hold her by the waist to bring her close to him.

He hooked her pinky with his own. “I guess you’re worth the trouble.”

... Terra wore the Wayfinder around his neck. Its bright blue stood out against the earthy tones of his clothes. He placed his hand on his sternum, underneath the trinket, as he stared at the mirror. It felt light on his chest, sitting close to his heart.

From her peripheral, a small light blinked from his dresser. A message on his communicator. It was Riku. The message said that Sora found a Keyblade washed up on the beach of their home world, and Riku asked if they could come together to investigate it.

Terra looked back through the windows, seeing that the sun left a sliver of red along the horizon. The stars were bright. He reached up to touch her Wayfinder again, and stepped out of the motel to summon his glider.

YOOOO so if you haven’t heard, I’ve gotten some requests to expand on this and include Terra saving her and their eventual reconciliation. Let me know if that’s what you would like, as I’m mulling it over!

Thank you guys so much for reading this! Especially to those of you who stuck by this particular story. The mention of the Keyblade that Sora found is essentially inspired by the multiple theories that were popping up all over the place over the very first trailer for Kingdom Hearts III, where Sora found Eraqus’ Master Defender on the beach of Destiny Islands - possibly hinting that Aqua was severed from it when she turned into Aquanort. Most of these theories say that it’s the key to finding Ventus - since it would be terribly out of character for her to put him in such danger. I just wanted to play with a tragic love story. I hope you guys enjoyed this!!

#terraqua angst #terqua #kingdom hearts fanfiction #kh fanfic #aquanort #terra #aqua #young xehanort #can't believe it took me this long to update #but i felt like my other works needed so much attention #but it's here!#let me know what you think please <3 #my fic

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kaoruyogi · 8 years

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How to Win Wars and Influence Nobles (Ch. 2)

Rating: E for Explicit/NSFW Content!

Check it out on AO3!

You’d think a video game lawyer could just drop into a pseudo-medieval universe filled with magic and demons and be totally okay with it, right?

Nah.

In the wake of her brother, Spencer’s, disappearance, Belle dropped into Thedas with luggage, but without a clue. After a brief but memorable panic attack, she resolved to be the best goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. Even if she was the only goddamn lawyer Thedas had ever seen. And even if that obstinate asshole, Cullen, wouldn’t stop giving her the side-eye every time she walked into a room…Or every time he walked into a room with her in it…Or every time they walked into a room together…Or–Fuck it. You get it.

Chapter 2: That Vexing Interloper

The queerly dressed, foul-mouthed woman cried for nearly three hours after she woke the second time. Josephine insisted that all three advisors wait in the woman’s room until she calmed enough to discuss how she’d come to be with them. The entire exercise was feckless and pretextual as far as he was concerned. They could have put her in the cells to question her, or Leliana could have extracted whatever information she wanted in her own way. Instead they detained her in comfort, in her own room, while so many shared quarters or slept in tents in the valley below. That thought alone left him piqued—agitated in a way he never would have been if he’d seen anyone else crying. Anyone but her.

The way she’d spoken to him was impudent, to say the very least. While it was clear she had no idea who he was, that fact mattered little to him. That she thought her desires were more important than their cause, however, was a galling concept. He despised the nobility for the same reason, making it obvious to him that the two of them were not going to see eye to eye.

However, Leliana was uncharacteristically kind to her, and Josephine rubbed her back and cooed soothing little assurances for almost the entirety of the three hours of sobbing. Cullen stood with his arms crossed by the door, glowering at the weeping woman. She rocked back and forth, whimpering and puling, having wrapped herself up in a blanket to ward the cool winds away from her pale skin. Loose, winding tendrils of her deep red hair fell over her shoulder as she sniffled and swayed.

He would puff out a loud sigh every now and again to remind the women that they all had better things to do than watch this vexing interloper lament her circumstances. Josephine stared more than a few daggers into him in response. So there he waited. Until she finally began to speak.

Her name was Belle. She haled from someplace called “Orange County, California”—a strange name for a strange place. The year there was 2017, but she couldn’t explain what age it was. She said they didn’t have ages, but then rattled on about the “Middle Ages” and the “Bronze Age” and the “Industrial Age” and something about how ages were never named until after they were over in a flustered stream of consciousness he thought would never end. He became more grateful as she rambled that they hadn’t had time to question the other one. There was no telling what the young man may have spewed out in this state.

She asked for her glasses, telling Cullen they were in her purse next to him. When he looked inside the black and cream colored satchel, a jumble of bright colors and papers and tiny trinkets perplexed him so that he just hurled the whole mess onto the bed in front of her.

“Oh my God, will you stop disrespecting my shit?!” She hollered her curses at him after the odd leather bag spilled some of its contents, an angry, wounded look on her tear-swollen face. “First you want to dig through it, then you don’t want to dig through it, then you’re fucking hucking it at me.” Her head swung from one side to the other as she spoke, her voice still a bit nasal. “Fine. I get it. You don’t like me. You don’t want me here. Well, guess what, Commander Cullen Ruther-whateverthefuck of the Inquisition, I don’t want to be here either.”

She opened an misshapen orange leather pouch and pulled out a pair of clear eyeglasses, not at all like the dark monstrosities she’d been wearing when they found her. Once they were affixed to her face, she looked at him again, calmer this time. “But apparently I’m stuck here. So apparently you’re stuck with me.”

He couldn’t argue with her logic. Though he might argue that they weren’t quite as stuck with her as she was in Thedas. They could take her to Denerim or Val Royeaux and be rid of her. He remained silent, keeping that option to himself.

“How did you come to Thedas?” Leliana asked.

“I don’t know. If I had to guess, it probably happened when that weird green wormhole thing defied all science and reason and sucked me up in the middle of the street.”

The spymaster turned her attention to Cullen. “Your men said she fell from a rift, did they not?”

Of the three of them, he’d had the greatest exposure to Fade rifts. He spent days after the Breach opened fighting off the demons gushing out of the things. So he nodded. “That is also how the first one fell into the wreckage of the Temple. I do not know what a ‘wormhole’ is, but the way she describes it, I believe it is a Fade rift. How one might have opened in this ‘Orange County’ without simply pouring out demons is rather puzzling.”

“Perhaps we should ask Dagna to research this,” Josephine said, speaking up for the first time in what may have been minutes or hours. Her hand still rested on the bespectacled intruder’s shoulder.

Leliana nodded. “Yes, though she will want to take samples.”

A bulky curl flew through the air as the Belle’s head whirled to level a stare at the spymaster. “What do you mean, ‘samples’? Like, ‘oh we’ll just take a piece of her shirt and a few skin cells’ samples or, ‘well, hey, it’s time to chop off a foot’ samples?”

“Somewhere in between, I imagine.”

“Listen, if you’re trying to be funny, comedy has this thing called ‘timing.’ I don’t think you’ve grasped it.”

The spymaster smiled—actually smiled—at the impertinent woman, and she managed to smile back. It was a weak thing, but there was something pleasing about it. It was genuine and warm, and her bottom lip stretched more than her top one. He cleared his throat to jostle himself from the thought.

Three sets of eyes fixed themselves on him, all of them perturbed. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and when the women had determined he had nothing useful to add they returned to their conversation.

“You guys keep talking about ‘the young man’ and ‘the other one.’ There was someone else who dropped in on you like I did?”

Leliana nodded. “There was.”

“Who is he? Do he and I have anything in common that might have drawn both of us here?” Belle’s hazel eyes bore a glimmer of hope beneath their watery sheen.

“I think perhaps we will keep his name to ourselves until he returns in five days’ time. We are uncertain whether anything may link the two of you, and we have not yet ruled out Corypheus’s involvement in your sudden appearance.”

Offhand, Cullen couldn’t fathom anything that might have linked the young man to Belle. They differed in far too many ways.

“I don’t know who or what that is, but I get it.” The outsider accepted Leliana’s reply with too little protest, in his opinion. While he preferred this non-sobbing version of her, he found her sudden surrender peculiar.

As if reading his thoughts, she looked him dead in the eye and said, “It’s pointless for me to argue with you all. I gather that you’re at war here—needing a Commander and a keep and the clanging swords outside and everything—and I definitely can’t get home without another wormhole or rift or whatever. So all I can do for now is wait until we sort this out and thank you for your help.” Her stare was fixed on him as she spoke, her voice leaving her dusky lips in a tone so even and controlled it was like a different person was talking.

Could they read minds in Orange County?

“Do you have a trade where you come from?” Josephine asked. It was a good question. The Inquisition could not afford to feed anyone that did not work, let alone quarter them. In a private tower only feet from his own. He stifled a growl at the thought.

Belle sniffled and pushed at her nose with her knuckle. “I did. I do? Yes, I guess would be the best answer, ignoring tenses. I’m an attorney.”

Confounded glances flicked between each of the advisors. It was a rare occasion, indeed, when not one of them knew the meaning of a word. Even rarer when the word was related to a trade. Their combined experience with the varied peoples of Thedas offered them a wide pool of knowledge from which to draw their comprehension. Orange County must have been quite bizarre.

Josephine, it seemed, was the first of them brave enough to admit she did not understand. “I apologize. I have never heard of such a trade.” Her hazel eyes cast down for a moment as she considered her next words. “What does it entail?” she asked, looking to Belle’s face again. Their eyes appeared remarkably similar in color from where he stood.

“Oh. Um. Okay, so you don’t have attorneys here. That must make things easier and harder all at once.” Belle was muttering again. She took a deep breath, and as she did her hands rose up in front of her. Her nails were long and covered in some sort of paint. Tiny lines and patterns wove from finger to finger in glittering shades of blue and purple and pink. It was like nothing Cullen had ever encountered before. Like miniscule paintings. Perhaps “attorney” meant “painter” where she came from.

“Okay, an attorney is someone who works with the law,” she said. Her hands moved while she spoke, her long fingers curving with surprising delicacy. Her pinkies stayed out straighter than the others, but not completely straight. Odd.

Cullen ventured a guess. “Is it a post in a guard force?”

Belle bunched her mouth up on the left side of her face. “Not really? Umm…” She hummed and drew both lips between her teeth. “Attorneys—or lawyers or counselors we’re sometimes called—help create the law. Then we help people use the law to protect themselves and attack others who’ve violated it.” Strange. Cullen had only ever heard of monarchs and nobility making the law or punishing violators.

“Most of us specialize in a particular area or study because there are so many laws. I specialize in video ga—Um…I worked a lot on negotiations, drawing up contracts, employment agreements, privacy agreements, and terms of use, and with copyright and trademark stuff. I worked on some incorporations. I also did a little bit of business advisory work with some of my clients. I’d help them with strategies to grow their companies and make more money. Oh, and I do a little mediating here and there.” She splayed her fingers out in a kind of shrug and raised her eyebrows. He supposed she was finished.

Cullen had never seen Josephine’s eyes light up like they did as Belle explained herself. No one in that room understood some of the words she’d said. There was little doubt about that. But Josephine heard “negotiations,” “contracts,” “agreements,” “grow,” and “more money” and began to glow like the sun. It was unsettling.

Leliana let out a small laugh—also unsettling. “I believe we may have found someone of your ilk, Josie.”

The lady ambassador ignored the remark, the entirety of her energy now honed in on their uninvited guest. She spoke with the voice of a child on Satinalia morning. “Truly? Your work involves contracts and negotiations?” She leaned forward as she pried—unaware of her own movement, Cullen imagined. Josephine was not one to relinquish her composure.

Meanwhile, Belle leaned back, eyes wide with surprise and mouth bearing a poorly bitten back grin. “Yes. That’s most of what I do—did—” She let out an exasperated sigh. She seemed to be having some difficulty reconciling her past and present. “Most of it has to do with contracts and negotiations. There’s other work, but that was my bread and butter.” A fitting choice of words, as that was what she would have to earn for as long as she stayed with them.

If she was not working for Corypheus.

Josephine’s expression turned pensive in a flash. “I could use someone like you. The nobility are fickle, and while many of them are useful for a transaction or two, there is no constant but me to track all of the Inquisition’s contracts. And I have no neutral nobility but myself to engage in negotiations.”

Belle’s face twisted into something like disgust. Who was she to feel disgusted at anything? Cullen’s contempt for her dredged itself up afresh, pricking at his fingertips, clutching the pommel of his sword just a little tighter.

“You’re doing all this by yourself? I mean, I get that you have people who work one or two cases for you, but no one’s got a consistent workload but you? And you’re the only negotiator for—what is this—a whole army?”

“The Inquisition is a peacekeeping force instituted to end the mage rebellion, seal the Breach, find those responsible, and bring them to justice.” Cullen said it like he’d said it hundreds of times. He had. Every new recruit that passed under his command heard it before anything else. They needed to hear it before anything else.

But their pale stranger looked unimpressed. “Okay, thanks. At ease.” She flicked her wrist and hand in an odd kind of salute and looked away for a moment before her eyes snapped back to him. “Wait a second, did you just fucking say ‘mage’?”

The conversation sped up from there. Much to Cullen’s chagrin, Leliana and Josephine poured information out to the interloper, who it seemed had never seen magic or even heard of a real mage. They explained the mage uprising in as simple a set of terms as they could, told her about the Temple of Sacred ashes, the Breach, and Corypheus, and she learned of the events at Haven less than a month ago. Leliana didn’t seem to think Belle was as much a threat as he did. She said too much, in his opinion. But it was her knowledge to give, and not his place to question. He was beginning to feel he was just there to stand guard and be ignored.

It was agreed upon—without Cullen’s input—that Belle would be granted access to Skyhold proper. She would read and research the laws and customs of Thedas until the Inquisitor’s return in five days. With him would come the Inquisition’s other drop-in and Seeker Cassandra Pentaghast. At that time, the advisors, Cassandra, and the Inquisitor would make a second assessment of both the outsiders’ potential threat level and determine whether they could remain part of the organization. If their statements were deemed credible and their loyalty assured, Belle would begin working as Josephine’s primary associate. This would put her in a position of power, allowing her access to the Inquisition’s funds, authority to negotiate and contract on behalf of the Inquisition, and the ability to communicate with all the nobility of Thedas. Cullen did not wish the last duty upon anyone.

They left her after nightfall, and after she finally realized they had moved her to the upper floor of a very tall tower. She whimpered something about a fear of heights and Josephine promised her a staircase if all went as she hoped. Leliana whispered something to one of her scouts on the battlements. He nodded and vanished into the night.

“She will be watched closely,” said the spymaster.

Cullen nodded his relief and approval. “She must be.”

*****

It was three days before he saw Belle again. Three times a day, Leliana’s scouts would report to her, then to him. Most of what they told him was innocuous. Belle spent the majority of her time in one of the libraries, and could either be found with her nose buried in a tome in the rotunda or amid the dusty shelves beneath Josephine’s office.

She screamed the first time she saw Dorian do magic, but immediately grabbed him by the wrist to demand that he do it again. One of the scouts reported seeing her in the garden trying to replicate the simple spell to no avail. Cullen thanked his lucky stars for that. The last thing he needed was an untrained mage traipsing about unattended.

She also spat out ale the first time someone gave it to her in the Herald’s Rest, claiming something about a sensitive stomach. Cullen wondered if that was a ruse she played up to keep her wits about her while she spied on them. She wouldn’t be the first to avoid dampening her senses to keep a keen eye.

She even blanched at shedding her clothes in the baths. He could only perceive such reticence as concealment of some telling mark on her body. Some scar or brand on her flesh must have bound her to Corypheus. And she saturated an otherwise clean drying cloth. Wasteful.

There was yet another report that Belle swallowed several smooth pebble-shaped objects every morning and sometimes throughout the day. They emerged from a mélange of bottles in varying shapes and colors. He was also told that she counted the objects that remained in the bottles with a look of worry affixed to her face. When asked once, she said they were for her stomach, head, back, and neck. She called them “pills” and “meds.” Adan speculated when pressed that perhaps, in Orange County, these “pills” and “meds” were a means of delivering healing herbs—like a potion or a poultice for one’s innards. Rubbish. Cullen suspected she was hiding magical items in her gut. Or perhaps she was swallowing the bits to keep some enchantment in place. As far-fetched as it may have sounded to someone else, he had seen stranger things. Recently, in fact.

It was well into the depths of Belle’s third night in Skyhold when Cullen encountered her again. He’d tried to sleep. At least he played at trying to fall asleep. Sleep was an elusive thing, grasping it a fever dream in and of itself. Most nights he managed about two or three hours of tumultuous rest, tossing and turning and plagued by nightmares of horrors past. He was beset by night sweats and lyrium withdrawal symptoms, made worse by the fact that he was still hiding his cessation of the stuff from the Inquisitor. The man had enough troubles without being burdened with Cullen’s.

He threw on the nearest breeches and tunic he could find, not bothering with the small laces that would have made his shirt presentable. The knot at the hip of his breeches was lazy at best. He just needed a cup of water. He convinced himself that would be enough to help him sleep. He pulled on his boots with his feet more than his hands, stomping his way past his grip to don the worn leather things.

After descending the ladder and exiting his quarters, Cullen cast a quick glance at Belle’s tower. Belle’s tower. He scoffed at the thought. It sat just above the stables where the horses and Warden Blackwall made their beds for the night. They should have given that tower to the Warden, not to some irksome woman who fell through a rift. No light or sound emanated from within, so Cullen believed her to be asleep.

He travelled down the stairs against the battlements into the rear courtyard. It was the way he always went when he needed water in the middle of the night. The way he could disturb the fewest people and be watched by the fewest guards. He tugged the wooden door open as quietly as he could, knowing that many of the cooks and servants slept just below. Likewise, he silenced his footfalls. He’d woken Donatien once, and was loathe to suffer the cook’s spoon-flailing wrath a second time.

An odd shadow on the wall and the sound of quiet humming stilled his steps. There was someone else in the kitchen. His eyes scanned the room until they landed on her. Belle sat on the floor next to roaring fireplace in a tangle of limbs. Her back settled against the wall. She wore a soft shirt with a strange image on it, black breeches made from a similar material covering her crossed legs. A heavy looking book lay open between her knees, its spine resting on one of her bare ankles. Her feet were bare too, and the toes of her right foot wiggled on her left thigh. Her right hand sat on the edge of the volume, holding a page aloft as though she was about to turn it. The fingers of her left hand splayed across her cheek. Cullen lost sight of three of them under her hair. It glowed like a fiery halo about her round face, set alight by the flames beside her. Her pinky brushed back and forth across her parted lower lip as she read, the nail occasionally finding itself between her teeth. Her lips were plush and soft like the rest of her body. They were rather enticing when they weren’t spewing vitriol at him.

She turned the page and reached down without looking. The movement drew Cullen’s attention away from his dangerous thoughts about her lips. Her fingers tapped the floor around a half-eaten Orlesian bread roll on a cloth in front of her knee. Her head turned to find the bread her hand hadn’t, and she grabbed it up. But then she caught sight of him.

Belle’s whole body jerked, hurling her bread into the fire and slamming the thick tome shut between her thighs with a loud thump. Her hand flew up to grip her chest. She gasped hard, her supple lips emitting what he could only imagine was a string of curses. “Jesus balls on a bike!” She hissed in a breath. “Fuck!”

He was frozen in place, overwhelmed by boyhood sensation so familiar it made his chest ache. Like he was caught doing something he shouldn’t have done. Seeing something he shouldn’t have seen. But that was wrong. She was the one doing something she shouldn’t have. “What are you doing in here at this time of night?”

She panted a few hard breaths before her hazel eyes flew up to meet his. “Reading, having a snack, what’s it look like? I’m a bad traveler, and I have no fucking idea what time zone this is, but I’m having a very hard time getting on your schedule. I’m also not a huge fan of climbing that godforsaken ladder in the tower. I should ask you the same thing. Shouldn’t you be—I dunno—sleeping or brooding or something?” There it was.

But he was befuddled. “I was…having trouble sleeping and I came in here for some water.” Maker’s breath. Why did he still feel he owed her an explanation?

She squinted up at him from behind her glasses. “Why are you so sweaty? It’s, like, forty-three degrees outside.”

He hadn’t noticed the sweat beading at his forehead and along his back until that moment. But he would not be explaining himself to the nettlesome woman any further. “You should not be in here.”

It was then that she stood. Belle snatched up the heavy book from the floor and marched right up to him. She stopped just shy of their bodies colliding. This close, Cullen could see the details of her eyes. They were blue-green like the sea, but a thick bronze starburst surrounded her pupils. Little flecks of ochre and sienna in that bronze ring made it look like armor—like a round shield that had been battered and marred and dented in the heat of battle. Where the rest of her was soft, her eyes were hard. Warrior’s eyes.

And those embattled eyes darted about, examining his face and boring down into him. “Why do you hate me so much?”

“I find you suspicious.”

“It’s more than that, though. I think there’s something fundamental about me you don’t like.” She canted her head to the side, her gaze never leaving his. Her lips had a natural part when she paused. “That’s fine. But when you find my story credible—and rest assured you didn’t have to wait for whoever the hell is coming back here to do that—we’re going to have to work together, you and I. And that, Commander Cullen Rutherford, is something you’re going to have to come to grips with.”

Belle stepped back, still staring at him. He held himself firm, keeping his posture tight and his jaw clenched. She was right. There was something fundamentally infuriating about her. He couldn’t put his finger on it. Perhaps it was her obstinacy or her foul mouth or her general disregard for their well-founded suspicions. Perhaps it was the way she looked at him.

Book in hand, she slipped past Cullen toward the back door through which he had entered. “By the way,” she said behind him, “I don’t know what kind of drugs you have here in Thedas, but I’ve seen plenty of people detox before. You were right to come down for water. And you should take extra. Hydration is key.” The door closed, shutting out her tempestuous eyes and her confounding lips once more.

He felt exposed. He did not know what “detox” meant, but the way she said it…Maker. She knew something about him that no one else did. She must have.

He retrieved his water from the deep basin and drank it down. It was cool on his parched throat, though it did little to soothe his frayed nerves. He was naked to her. He couldn’t shake the feeling. It hovered over him as he trudged back to his tower, as he climbed his ladder, as he lay sleepless through the wee hours of the morning.

Unsettling, needling woman.

It was yet another two days before he saw her again. She stood beside Josephine on the steps of Skyhold outside the main hall, awaiting Inquisitor Trevelyan’s arrival. She seemed firm and composed, an occasional sigh the only sign of her nerves. Even when the Inquisitor and his companions rode through the gate, she remained still. Until the young man came in.

He marched alongside several of Cullen’s infantrymen, his every step dutiful despite the cheering around them. Cullen realized he wasn’t the only one watching Belle when the soldiers entered. Leliana and Josephine had also locked their eyes on her.

But all she could do was stare down at the portcullis. Her eyes widened first. Her jaw dropped open next. At her sides, her hands trembled. She murmured something they couldn’t quite hear. When Josephine asked Belle to repeat herself, she obliged, only a touch louder.

“P,” she said. One letter, her voice barely a whisper as she said it.

“What?” Josephine asked.

“Spencer!”

Ah. So they did know each other.

*****

#cullen #cullen rutherford #commander cullen #cullen x belle #belle dolan #dragon age #dragon age inquisition #fanfic #mgit #htwwain #self indulgence au

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ravenvsfox · 8 years

Note

You're my fav fic writer here

(i lov u thank you sm, also this prompt is fucked up I had FUN)

Neil’s face is so sunken with grief that he’s barely recognizable. Andrew watches cooly as Nicky jokes with him, the energy of the team cascading down and off of Neil, water off an indifferent umbrella. This is not the same man who was buoyant with a fresh win half an hour ago, who holds exy in higher regard than his own life, some days.

Andrew crosses to him, siphoning Neil’s attention away from the action of the room to him, just him, their eyes hooked together.

“Thank you,” Neil says, his mouth trembling. “You were amazing.”

Andrew searches his face, waiting for more. The room around them feels hazily separate, his attention is pulled to every flicker of Neil’s eyes, every shape his mouth makes. Something is giving out like a rotting support beam, Andrew can feel the collapse as if it were happening in his own body.

He catches Wymack gesturing from the corner of his eye, and the foxes fall into line. Neil keeps holding Andrew’s gaze the way someone might watch their home disappear on the horizon as they drive away.

He turns on command, though, body held too casually to be genuinely at ease, walking in tandem with the men bracketing him.

Andrew levels Wymack with a dismissive look and turns on his heel to follow Neil to the parking lot, his heartbeat out-pacing his footsteps.

He watches the bobbing heads of the man in the reflective vest and his colleague guiding the team through a simmering crowd. A bottle careens past Aaron’s head and Andrew looks blackly out in the direction it was thrown from. His eyes return to Neil, and because he’s watching, he sees the moment the crowd swells and Neil is grabbed hard by the wrist.

Andrew starts running immediately, pushing his way through a crowd that feels more like the tumultuous surface of an angry ocean. He trips over a slippery bottle and clips a 6 foot tall Bearcats fan, who tries to punch Andrew and gets his hand ripped at the seam of his fingers for his trouble. The crowd is a firing squad pointed at him, but Andrew braves it without hesitation.

He loses sight of the shiny vest and Neil’s flaming hair, almost tripping again on a duffel bag upended in the street. He kicks viciously at it before realizing it’s Neil’s, his racquet dropped two feet away. It’s like a crime scene, like the gunpowder left in the wake of a ripping bullet.

Andrew scoops the racquet up and breaks into a flat-out sprint with it held in front of him, using its length to rake the crowd out of the way. They break, more interested in self-preservation than the spirit of revenge. Andrew gets a clear view of Neil’s shoulder being wrenched around, his face contorting with anger as he’s stuffed into the back of a highway patrol car.

“Stop,” Andrew calls, voice raised. He skids into the parking lot just as the door is closing on Neil, and four sets of eyes swing towards Andrew. He sees Neil mouth ‘no’ as a woman with an unhinged grin cranes around Neil, sizing Andrew up.

“Who’s this, Junior?”

Andrew’s head ruffles memories like cards, and he picks out the blood on the changing room mirror. Happy 19th Birthday Jr. He’d suspected it wasn’t Riko’s style.

“No one,” Neil says. “A teammate.” He gives Andrew a vaguely dismissive look, a more complete lie than Andrew’s seen from him in a long time. Figures that do-or-die situations are the only ones Neil applies logic to.

“A teammate,” the woman mimics. “You tell him?”

“Am I an idiot? Of course not,” Neil says, and jerks his head to the side, telling Andrew quietly to run. The men from earlier are piling out of the car again, clearly on some invisible cue from the woman in charge. “He doesn’t know anything,” Neil says more firmly.

“I know that you’re not taking him,” Andrew says. The woman laughs.

“Sorry to say that you don’t get to decide much of anything, no one,” she mocks. “He is our problem, and it’s about time we solved it.”

Andrew steps forward. “He’s not your problem anymore. He’s mine.”

Her gaze flickers down and up his body, and one of the men closes in. It’s a quick fight. Andrew takes the guy down by the legs and then pins him by the throat with one booted foot. He wheels around for the next threat, and then Neil calls his name frantically.

He looks up at him for one suspended moment; Neil’s eyes swallowed by terror, something whistling close to his ear, and then he’s jolted forward impossibly hard by a blow to the head, and everything blinks out.

____

He rouses to the smell of something burning, and he becomes aware, piece by piece, of how completely fucked they are.

There’s a cool leather chair-back pressed to his face and he can feel the clink of handcuffs elaborately pinning his wrists behind him, no slack to spare. He can move his head just enough to take stock of the car, what looks like an old cadillac interior, and that same woman in the seat across from him, carving pieces out of Neil’s arms.

Andrew jerks hard against the restraints and the woman turns, the knife slipping jaggedly in Neil’s blood-sloppy wrist. He catches a sweat-beaded expression of utter enjoyment on her face.

“We’ve got a live one,” she laughs to the driver. “Well. For now. How are you doing, Andrew?”

He knows the name drop is supposed to unnerve him but he’s busy straining full-body to get to Neil, kicking with bound feet. He takes furious inventory of Neil’s injuries. He hasn’t even noticed Andrew, he’s so wracked with agony, his body convulsing and ruining his wrists in the cuffs.

“Oh Andrew,” the woman’s voice singsongs, and her hand strokes his face.

“Don’t touch me,” he snarls. She looks delighted as she slaps him hard across the face.

“Feisty. We did a little research on you, AJ,” she coos, and he spits in her face. He hasn’t felt so out of control in years — his body is a thin skin over pure fire. She calmly wipes her face, tapping her knife on Neil’s hands as she tsk’s reprovingly.

“That’s pretty disrespectful,” she says, and accepts a dashboard lighter from the driver. “We kept you alive and everything.” Andrew ignores her, looking beyond her at Neil’s opening eyes, his clenched teeth. He’s more alert than most would be after the injuries he’s sustained. Andrew gets the full picture of Neil’s destroyed face, the blood and tears in his eyes and dripping down his chin. He can’t look away. He can’t.

“I’m Lola,” the woman introduces, clicking the lighter and digging her fingernails into Neil’s arm. “It seems only polite to let you in on the name of the woman who’s going to chop your boyfriend into little pieces.” She considers Neil weeping blood on the upholstery. “Well. Littler.”

“I’m going to kill you,” Andrew informs her. He holds Neil’s gaze and feels something huge and too late pass between them. The car is blazing red, it’s all he can see.

“Oh,” Lola says, interested, a little faux apologetic. “Let’s be adults, shall we? You’re going to be dead within the hour.”

She digs the lighter down into Neil’s forearm and Andrew struggles brutally again. It’s useless. It’s utterly useless, but he would die before he stopped trying.

“Neil,” he says, low and urgent. “Focus.”

“‘Neil’,” Lola laughs, reaching around the head rest to squish Neil’s burned cheeks. “Cute nickname, junior. Does he moan it when you’re fucking?”

“You already let me go,” Neil sobs, and Andrew becomes distantly aware that he’s talking to him. “You’re done. I’m nothing to you.” Neil’s so stupid, even now.

Andrew tests the handcuffs. He wishes he’d never woken up. He wishes he’d been faster back at the court. He wishes Neil could’ve been killed before Andrew had the opportunity to chain himself to him: the mast of a ship going down. His breath comes out like it’s going through a shredder.

They pull up to a rickety looking hotel moments later, and Neil’s head hangs, hair soaked through with sweat, hands twitching in handcuffs, blood masking the worst of his injuries. Andrew sinks lower, and panic seizes his lungs, pinching them like dry dish towels.

He knows some of Neil’s past and he knows his own, but it’s been so long since he’s had to see what complete destruction looks like from the outside.

They’re unhooked from the car one by one and ushered past two policemen who are watching them with wide eyes. Andrew doesn’t let them squirm away from their guilt, he pins them with his eyes like bugs under glasses.

“How much do my father’s people pay you to break your oaths?” Neil asks, voice familiar again, idiotic, brave, impossible.

“More than the state does,” one of them says, rubbing his arms against the cool night air. “Don’t take it personally.”

“I have to,” Neil says shakily, looking back at Andrew through a wince. “It’s our lives.”

“Should we kill him now?” the man who had been driving asks, nodding towards Andrew. Lola eyes him, considering. The officers jostle uncomfortably at the thought of directly viewing the products of their crime.

“We’ll let Nathan decide,” she announces after a beat, prodding Andrew’s back hard with the handle of her knife.

He fights against Lola and the driver but his arms are where all of his strength is, and they’re useless behind his back. He’s dumped headfirst into the trunk of a new police cruiser, and thumped in the chest so that he slips backwards, his back to the cabin of the car.

Neil’s pushed in next, his battered body snug to Andrew’s, blood seeping immediately through Andrew’s shirt and painting his fox jacket red. It’s a foolish comfort to have Neil near him, the living heat of his body and the persistent hammer of his heart. Andrew’s face is level with Neil’s neck, and he breathes into his collar, the only way he can touch him without his hands.

Impossibly, Lola climbs in after them both, pressing in close to Neil and sending shockwaves of utter hatred through Andrew.

“Cozy,” she says. “Good thing you’re both child-sized.” Andrew watches her nestle a gun at Neil’s side, a warning for both of them. She slings a leg over Neil’s and nuzzles in close. “Cute, too. Just like your father.” Her eyes are bright in the dark. “Andrew’s got a pretty face, too, don’t you think?”

“Get his name out of your mouth,” Neil grits. Andrew can feel the effort it takes not to try anything more, the tension in his shoulders. He feels it too.

“Don’t worry,” she purrs. “We’re almost at the end of the line.”

The car jostles as it gets moving again, and Andrew seethes at the thought of Lola rocking into Neil with the motion. He didn’t expect anything better from the police force, but the muffled sound of their voices so close to this is revolting.

The sirens kick up to full force after a few minutes, and Lola shushes the sound Neil makes with a nip at his burns. “Seems there’s been an incident at your father’s house. Perhaps some vandalism from lowlifes unwilling to have him back in their neighbourhood, fools who buy into the conspiracy theory that he killed his beloved wife and child.”

“People you paid to create a disturbance tonight,” Neil says resignedly, “so police could stop by unquestioned.”

“Ten points to Junior. He’s smart when he applies himself,” she whispers conspiratorially to Andrew. He ignores her. Neil’s rapid untangling of events, the rebellion in the face of certain death, the twitch in his legs to run, even now. This must have been his whole life, Andrew realizes. His whole time on the run fearing exactly this.

And you couldn’t keep him from it, something in him whispers. You’re both dead because you slipped on a beer bottle. Because you couldn’t part the crowd fast enough. Because you got distracted in a fight like Renee told you never to do.

It’s a bumpy ride, voices crescendoing outside the window but sirens petering out. Lola reaches over them both for something, and Neil’s bound hands clutch at Andrew’s jacket behind him, even though it must hurt.

“I’ll do your friend first,” Lola whispers to Neil, and Andrew smells the unmistakable tang of chloroform in the close, sweaty space. “I have a feeling he’ll make trouble.”

Andrew jerks back when she tries to close fabric over his face, bucking so that her hand slips in the dark. Neil whimpers in pain at being jostled and Andrew has no choice but to stop moving, to present his face to her and take it.

Even in this war zone, even watching Neil’s lies vomited up in the most violent way possible, submitting to Lola is one of the worst things he’s done today. He feels the drugs take him, resenting the horrible slither of them, the heaviness in his legs and arms. He hears Neil inhale, and then there’s nothing at all.

____

He wakes up on contact with unforgiving stone, the room spinning back and forth every time he moves his head. He closes his eyes against it, then opens them, searching for a splash of red in the monotonous grey. His eyes settle on Neil being manhandled down some sort of passageway, his body limp.

Andrew clings to consciousness, thinking idly of his tolerance for medication, his susceptibility to easy waking. He fluctuates between relief and impatience at Neil’s closed eyes. He doesn’t know where they are or what’s coming, and Neil’s the only one who can navigate their way out.

“Not much of a tolerance, hmm?” Lola remarks, toeing Neil’s slack face with her shoe. She looks back at Andrew and cocks her head, reaching one hand out expectantly to her side. He doesn’t know why until she accepts a heavy looking shovel and smashes it into his face.

____

He wades to consciousness for the third time in three hours, head screaming. Neil’s at the sink in the corner now, cradling his own hands, and Lola idly twirls her gun in his direction.

Neil meets Andrew’s eyes immediately when he turns around. He shakes his head so slightly that no one else would’ve caught it. Andrew knows in his gut that he has to feign unconsciousness, that there are two of them and one of Lola and they’re not even cuffed. His armbands are still on, a terrible oversight on Lola’s part. His knives are warm at his inner arm.

He doesn’t know his way out, but Neil must. Andrew’s fresh, strong, able, despite the ringing in his head, and Neil’s mind is a vault for whatever secrets landed him here.

“How much longer is this going to take?” Neil asks, doubtless for Andrew’s benefit.

Lola replies, transparently threatening, amused. She mentions ‘his’ style of killing and Andrew flips idly through the possibilities. Not Moriyamas, surely. Someone associated with Neil’s family, someone with connections. His head clangs like alarm bells, fake sleep slip-slides into real sleep and back again.

He tries to catch Neil’s hyper-alert gaze but each time he does he gets a head-shake for his trouble. Something upstairs is holding Neil down like a sword through his chest.

Time passes strangely, darkly. The room is quiet save for the muffle of voices above and the click of the gun as Lola flicks the safety on and off.

Maybe forty-five minutes have passed when everything abruptly shifts. Andrew slits his eyes and watches Neil’s face go dead cold as someone comes down the stairs, bare feet first, and then cuffed dark jeans, a neat shirt, a scowling face.

It’s so unquestionably Neil’s father that Andrew has to fight to keep his breathing even. He turns Neil’s story in Wymack’s apartment over in his head. It’s something that’s always been sour, lies that Andrew had fought hard to believe.

He feels white hot rage at everyone in the room, people he should’ve known to protect Neil from, people hidden by Neil’s own foolish self-preservation.

Someone else hulking follows Neil’s father — Nathan, Andrew remembers — down the stairs, and Andrew and Neil’s window to escape closes cleanly.

“On your feet,” Nathan says. “You know better than to sit in my presence.”

Andrew watches, sick, as Neil stands immediately, organizing his wrecked limbs like the injuries aren’t there. Andrew knows what it’s like to be so scared of being destroyed that you’ll do anything. He knows the feeling of choosing the pain you have over the threat of more. Lola laughs in the background.

“Hello, Junior,” Nathan says. His eyes slide beyond Neil, to Andrew’s slumped form. “Who’s this?”

“Collateral,” Lola says. “Shall we kill him?”

Nathan’s eyes narrow, so like Neil’s but so utterly unwanted. “You know he’s faking sleep, of course,” he says, and stalks closer. He lifts his foot up to stomp on Andrew’s face and Andrew catches it, twists. Nathan staggers but maintains his balance, and his smile is that of a starving lion.

“Oh you are dead.”

Andrew rolls onto his knees, and the big guy in the corner comes forward. Nathan waves him off.

“I don’t think he’ll fight.”

“You don’t know me,” Andrew says blankly. Neil’s eyes are huge, darting back and forth between Andrew and Nathan like he can’t believe what’s in front of him.

“I’ve got him,” Lola says, brandishing the gun and closing one eye, tongue out, a caricature of concentration. She shoots Andrew in the thigh.

He doesn’t make a sound, but his body crumples. His whole leg is lava; he’s shocked to find it in one piece when he looks down.

It’s difficult to focus on voices or things beyond the boundaries of his pain. Neil is getting punched somewhere in the room, looking his father in the eye and taking it. They’re discussing disappointments, dead mothers and broken people. The picture gets clearer, slowly, the right prescription settling in just when Andrew doesn’t want to see.

Andrew staunches the bleeding as best he can with his hand but it fountains past his fingers. It’s inconvenient, is the thing. It’s one leg less. He tries to look at Neil but Neil’s eyes are frozen on his father, his jaw down in utter submission. Andrew won’t forget that look on him, even if he sees it replaced by fire and smart comments a hundred times over.

Nathan rhapsodizes about his upcoming torture before he launches into it and Andrew really is bored of the way these people talk. “…you’re not going to run away this time, Nathaniel. I’m not going to let you.”

“Fuck you,” Neil says, back to himself as soon as Andrew could think to miss him. Neil glances at him, eyes dribbling down to his leg. His face is a wash of every bad emotion, like a slur of murky watercolour. “He’s going to bleed out,” Neil says. Nathan’s busy collecting his weapons, and he looks back at Andrew, unimpressed.

“He’s going to watch, first.” Nathan strolls up to Andrew and squats at his side, neatly avoiding the growing pool of blood. “What is my son to you?”

“An annoyance,” Andrew says, and thrusts a knife up into Nathan’s chest. His aim is off, but it’s enough to throw him backwards, and he slips in Andrew’s blood, toppling back to the floor hard.

Andrew looks up and finds Neil in the commotion that follows, both hands over his mouth.

A lot happens at once, then. Lola lunges for Nathan, clearly not quite sure whether she should do something for him without being asked.

The big man looms threateningly towards Andrew but Neil dives for the cleaver Nathan dropped and tosses it with deadly accuracy into the centre of the man’s chest.

Nathan struggles upright and grabs for his blunt axe, blood still gushing down his front, eyes wild. “Don’t let them leave.”

Neil holds the cleaver in front of him, a dangerous cornered animal with the skill to back his desperation up. Lola’s gun still outmatches him, in a distance fight.

Or would, if Andrew hadn’t grabbed the back of her knees and forced her down. “For a professional, you leave a lot of loose ends,” he says, and he scoops up the gun to give her a matching bullet hole in her leg. She howls, Nathan curses, Neil steps closer, shaking with relief.

“You’ve lost,” he says, and stares down his father, looking like a resurrected corpse, bloody and vengeful.

The ceiling opens to gunfire and shouts, and Andrew plasters himself to the floor. Neil drops beside him, hands over his head, and Nathan takes advantage of his weakness, hefting his axe up and aiming it at the back of Neil’s neck.

A bullet catches his hand, and the weapon clatters uselessly to the floor beside Neil’s head. People pack into the cellar, grim faces behind various weapons.

“Bloody hell. Nathaniel?” someone says, and Andrew glances up into an unfamiliar middle-aged face. He registers Neil nodding, Nathan cowering on the floor like an animal, the stranger moving close and smoothly cocking his gun at Andrew.

“No,” Neil says quickly, “he’s with me.”

Andrew has the strangest feeling of emotion leeching from him again, losing hours of saturated panic along with his blood.

The man says something to Neil that ends with: “don’t look. This will be over in a moment.” He turns on Nathan.

Andrew shoots Nathan before the stranger has the chance to, a bullet through his forehead, one good shot. He falls like a spent balloon, pathetic and wheezing.

There’s a stunned silence, and then Neil starts laughing behind his hands, wild, unfunny laughter.

“Stop that,” Andrew says, unnerved to his bones. Neil looks at Andrew and seems to sober immediately.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers. The man speaks to Neil in hushed, frantic tones, and Andrew can pick out stray words. FBI. Moriyamas. Butcher.

They’re smuggled up a narrow passageway by rough guiding hands. Andrew limps heavily on his right leg and Neil favours different sides of his body from step to step. He is a balance in every injury, a symmetrical ruin.

They burst out into the night and there are police, again, hoisting them to their feet and pointing guns in their faces.

“You’re too late,” Neil says thickly, “my father is dead.”

Andrew watches the agents trying to get Neil’s attention, snapping in his face, but his eyes are unfocused and wandering. Andrew knows instinctively that he’s reliving his father’s death on loop.

“My name is Nathaniel Wesnisnski,” Neil says, eyes sliding to Andrew’s, chin high. “And my father is dead.”

He smiles, warped, and keels over in the bushes, throwing up violently with strange hands holding him upright. The sight spurs Andrew into motion, suddenly, unhindered by barrels of guns and clever cutting hands. He moves forward on one leg and slaps the agents’ hands away, grabbing Neil by the shoulders.

“Neil.”

He doesn’t look up, doesn’t seem to recognize the name.

“We won,” Andrew says, wiping blood from Neil’s eyelashes, holding him upright by his uninjured waist.

“We won,” Neil repeats, and his legs give out. Andrew goes down with him, not strong enough on one leg and 60% blood volume to take the full weight of Neil’s body.

They end up knotted together on the Wesninski lawn, both of them fading from blood loss but unflinchingly alive.

#they lived aren't u thrilled #aftg #andreil #the foxhole court #tfc fanfic #torture tw #abuse mention #violence tw #prompt #mine #Anonymous #ask

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

Text

The Wise Man's New Clothes

by Dan H

Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Dan did not find the second volume of the Kingkiller Chronicles to be worth the wait~

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. My name is Kvothe. You may have heard of me.

Thus begins the blurb on the back of the first volume of Patrick Rothfuss' Kingkiller Chronicles, and it's repeated on the second.

This is partly because, like many Fantasy novels, the Kingkiller Chronicles is really just one massive, massive novel chopped roughly into three parts. I suspect, however, that it's also partly because the blurb on the back of a book is usually a summary of what happens in the book, and despite weighing in at just shy of one thousand pages of densely printed text, the Wise Man's Fear is actually rather short on the “things happening” front.

If I had to summarize the entire book in twenty-five words or less I would do it like this:

Kvothe is awesome. He meets people who tell him how awesome he is, and they teach him to be even more awesome. The end.

As I so often say at the start of these articles: I am almost tempted to leave it there.

I'm not going to break down the sequence of events in the book, explain how Kvothe goes from the University to Vintas to Faerie to Ademre back to Vintas and back to the University – it's not really what happens in the book (insofar as anything happens) that I'm concerned about, it's the way in which the whole book collapses into a godawful mess of juvenile wish-fulfilment which undermines any hope I might have had for the series.

Oh, I should also add that this wound up getting far longer and far angrier than I intended. Sorry.

A Little Context

The Name of the Wind was spectacularly well received. Like spectacularly well. It won awards, it was praised by the likes of Orson Scott Card and Ursula le Guinn, it was one of those books people admitted to disliking only with a note of shame in their voices.

The book has become something of a poster child for what is best in the Fantasy genre – rich worldbuilding, clever storytelling, intricate plotting and a knowing deconstruction of the tropes and assumptions on which it is based (although to be honest, even in 2007 I was a little bored of deconstruction – it's still worth doing, but people really need to stop pretending that it's a new idea, I mean hell Elric was a deconstruction of the tropes of the fantasy genre).

I was

sceptical but ultimately positive

about the first volume, ultimately concluding that it was doing a lot of interesting things with the medium, and cleverly analysing the intersection between reality and myth, people and legends.

I was disappointed, therefore, to find myself reading a book which, amongst other things, devotes eleven out of its hundred and fifty two chapters to describing how its sixteen year old protagonist spent three days having sex with a hot faery woman who by the way thought he was totally awesome at sex.

The Double Standard

This bit is going to be a bit high-horsey, for which I apologise in advance.

Ages ago I read Trudi Canavan's Age of the Five trilogy and

concluded

that when you put all of the protagonist's skills end to end they made her look like a godawful Mary-Sue. But ultimately this was forgiveable because when you get right down to it The Age of the Five was mostly an enjoyable bit of girly fluff which wasn't trying to do anything serious.

For the record, at the start of the book Kvothe is one of the greatest musicians the world has ever seen, fluent in several languages, a precocious magician, able to call upon magic of a kind few even believe exists, able to climb walls and pick locks, a master artificer, skilled in both arts and sciences, endlessly resourceful and never ever meets a woman who doesn't fancy him. By the end of the book he's all of that, plus he's even better at magic, has learned secret martial arts techniques that make him better at fighting than anybody he will ever meet except for the people who taught him, has gained the ear of several powerful people, and has been taught secret sex skills by a hot older woman who never the less thought that he was pretty amazing at doing sex even before she taught him to be more amazing at doing sex (I will come back to this a lot because I think it's probably the most stupid and juvenile part of what I now am convinced is a fundamentally stupid and juvenile text).

What annoys me about Kvothe is not so much that he's a gratuitous Mary-Sue, but that despite this fact he is taken incredibly seriously by critics. People bitch about how unrealistic it is that everybody fancies Bella Swan, about how stupid it is for teenage girls to indulge in a fantasy where powerful supernatural beings are sexually attracted to them. People laugh at characters like Sonea and Auraya because they're just magic sparkly princesses with super-speshul magic sparkle powers. But take all of those qualities – hidden magic power, ludicrously expanding skillset, effortless ability to attract the opposite sex despite specifically self-describing as being bad at dealing with them, and slap it on a male character, and suddenly we get the protagonist of one of the most serious, most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the last decade.

Of course you can't ever really say, for certain, how a book would have been received if you reversed the genders of its author and protagonist, but something tells me that a book about a red-haired girl who plays the lute and becomes the most powerful sorceress who ever lived by the time she's seventeen, and who has a series of exciting sexy encounters with supernatural creatures, would not have been quite so readily inducted into the canon of a genre still very uncertain about its mainstream reputation.

Imre

I know I said I wasn't going to go through the events of the book in detail, but I am going to discuss my irritation with the book in a broadly chronological sequence. This is simply because the book is so huge and so lacking in structure (beyond the obvious detail that some events happen after some other events) that it's far easier to think of it in terms of “The Imre Bit”, “The Vintas Bit”, “The Felurian Bit” and “The Ademre Bit”.

So the book starts off with Kvothe in Imre, where it's a straight continuation of Imre sections of the first volume. Kvothe is unable to pay his tuition again, which I wouldn't object to if it weren't for the fact that I've already read that plotline in book one (about the first quarter of the book, indeed, could be seen as the end of the first volume as much as the beginning of the second). We're thrown pretty much headfirst back into the setting, which was kind of jarring because dude, I read the original two years ago and I sure as hell won't be going back and rereading it to remind myself who Simmon and Kilvin and Exa Dal are (I did eventually remember, but I spent quite a while choking on name soup).

I'm afraid this article is going to be something of a list of Things That Annoyed Me. There were two Things That Annoyed Me about Imre.

The first was an issue that I remember having trouble with in the first book, which I have taken to referring to as the “poverty wanking”. Kvothe spends a lot of time being poor. He spends even more time telling the reader that if they have never been truly poor, they cannot understand what it is like to be poor. This is true, and I could almost accept this as a brave attempt to challenge the class privilege of his readership (and Lord knows I've got plenty of that – I've never had to deal with real shortage of money in my entire life, and I do absolutely take for granted the fact that food and housing and hot water and broadband internet access will be easily within my reach from now until the day I die) but there's just something about the whole thing that rings hollow.

I think mostly it's the fact that while Kvothe only has two shirts, and has to worry about finding the money to pay for his University tuition (something which, in his world, is itself a massive privilege, and one which Kvothe barely even needs given his precocious talent and secret route into the Archives) but he has several easy sources of income which, by the standards of his world, are very lucrative (he makes and sells magic artefacts for pity's sake; a profession for which only a handful of people in the world are qualified, and which he does better than pretty much anybody else out there), and he gets free room and board from a local tavern in return for his services as a musician (he also makes money performing at a local music venue, and while it's not much by the standards of the nobility it's certainly enough to live on). I'm annoyed by enforced poverty as a fictional trope at the best of times (why hello Season Six Buffy, fancy seeing you here) but Kvothe's constantly reminding us that “if you have never been truly poor, you will not understand” makes me want to throw something.

I know I'm on thin ice here, because frankly I'm as middle class as they come. I've never slept a night without a roof except that one time I went camping, I've never missed a meal except through laziness, I spent a year unemployed but I was well supported by my friends and relatives and live in a country with an adequate (if not generous) benefits system. I have, however, read a great many first-hand descriptions of real poverty from people who really haven't know where their next meal is coming from. Kvothe's life is nothing like the lives of those people, and barring the (extremely forced) homeless sequence in book one, it never has been. Kvothe does not read like a poor man who is forced to scrabble for every penny just to pay for life's necessities, he reads like a middle class kid who is jealous of the fact that his rich friends have better toys than he does. It wouldn't be a problem on its own, but the smug, sanctimonious insistence that I “cannot understand” his plight because I have “never known poverty” made me want to scream. No, I haven't known poverty, but Kvothe isn't poor, he's just not rich.

Sorry, that rant's been waiting for two years.

The second thing that annoyed me about the Imre sections was – well it wasn't really a feature of the Imre sections themselves, so much as the way they were resolved and led into the next bit of the plot. Kvothe's university shenanigans go on for a long time. Like I say, this is a long book. A long, long book. Again (I have mentioned this before, I will mention this again) the book spends eleven chapters describing how Kvothe totally got to score with a hot chick. It's long. It's wordy. The author bio on the inside back cover describes Patrick Rothfuss as somebody who “loves words, laughs often, and refuses to dance” and he seems to have chosen to demonstrate his love of words by including a great many superfluous ones.

The Imre section ends with Kvothe being put on trial for malfeasance (using magic for harm), and Kvothe pointedly refuses to discuss it despite the fact that (according to the Chronicler) it's a major part of his legend. This didn't bother me so much since I was pretty sure a long courtroom sequence would be deathly dull. Then, however, he gets an offer of patronage from the Maer of Vint, which requires him to take leave of the University and undergo a hazardous journey to a foreign kingdom. Here is how this journey is handled in the book:

Several unfortunate complications arose during the trip. In brief there was a storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck, although not in that order. It also goes without saying that I did a great many things, some heroic, some ill-advised, some clever and audacious. Over the course of my trip I was robbed, drowned, and left penniless on the streets of Junpui. In order to survive I begged for crusts, stole a man's shoes and recited poetry. The last should demonstrate more than all the rest how truly desperate my situation became. However, as these events have little to with the heart of the story, I must pass them over in favour of more important things. Simply said, it took me sixteen days to reach Severen. A bit longer than I had planned, but at no point during my journey was I ever bored.

Now okay, I get it. I really do. Because this is a serious fantasy novel which deconstructs genre conventions and plays with your expectations Rothfuss is deliberately glossing over a segment in Kvothe's life which, in a lesser novel, would be highlighted. I get it. I even get that because Kvothe is narrating the whole novel in first person, his choice to skip over this section reveals something about his character, both his jaded unwillingness to revel in tales of adventure and his almost childlike delight in subverting the expectations of Bast and the Chronicler (which parallel Rothfus' delight in subverting the expectations of his intended audience oh do you see how many levels this works on).

But.

This section appears on page three hundred and sixty five. It comes at the end of three hundred and sixty four pages which have been taken up with scenes where Kvothe converses with infuriatingly quirky girls (all of whom are hot), or infuriatingly eccentric old men (none of whom are hot), or with sequences which rehash plot threads which were already covered in the first book, or with endless conversations in which Kvothe engages in self-indulgent wordplay with either a hot quirky girl or an eccentric old man. I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things) and then score points by not describing a sequence of events that might have actually included some incident.

Also: funnily enough, I have no idea why a sequence in which Kvothe escapes from pirates has “nothing to do with the heart of the story” when a sequence in which he talks to an annoying quirky girl, or one in which he wanders around the Archives for ages finding no interesting or useful information, or one in which invents a new machine for catching arrows, or a scene where a hot woman offers him sex and a fortune in return for access to the Archives and he refuses, or a scene where he shows how totally awesome at playing music he is, or yet more of his pointless back-and-forthing with Ambrose, or any of the other things which take up the first third of the book are somehow totally vital to it.

This is because I have no idea what the heart of the story is or is supposed to be, and I am pretty sure I will have no way of knowing what the heart of the story was supposed to be until the last page of the last volume. I mean as I understood it the story was supposed to be about Kvothe's pursuit of the Chandrian, and how his chasing legends ultimately led him to become a legend, but all I got in the first three hundred and sixty four pages of The Wise Man's Fear was minutiae and pointless worldbuilding. If Kvothe wanted to focus on the heart of the story, he could have summed up half of the first book and a third of the second as “I went to the University looking for information about the Chandrian, but I didn't find any.”

Vintas

After Kvothe arrives in Vintas, things actually get a lot better (at least for a while) and I found myself getting back into the swing of things. I could have done without his having arrived penniless, necessitating yet another sequence in which Kvothe tricks his way into the towers of the great with nothing but the clothes on his back and his native wit but it's all dealt with fairly quickly and Kvothe's interactions with the court of the Maer of Vint are relatively well done (although once again, it basically consists of Kvothe being amazing at everything, and all the people who matter deciding that they will immediately like, trust, and respect him because of his obvious natural superiority – sorry this was in fact the section I liked, I just really think it's important to remember that Kvothe's social interactions make Bella Swan look well articulated).

In Vintas, Kvothe does many great things for the Maer, including helping him win the heart of his intended bride, which he manages to do perfectly despite the fact that at this stage in his life one of Kvothe's vanishingly small number of weaknesses is a complete unfamiliarity with romance and an inability to deal with women.

Kvothe's final service for the Maer of Vint is to go north with a motley band of mercenaries and sort out some bandits. This they do, chiefly because Kvothe is able to call down lightning from the sky and kill a whole bunch of them. Now in the previous book Kvothe is remembered as calling down lightning from the sky, when what he really does is throw some flashpowder at some people. This provided a nice illustration of the book's central ideas about the difference between myth and reality and the way tales grow in the telling. In the bandit encounter in book two, Kvothe really does just blow them all up with a lightning bolt. Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.

On the way back from his victory over the bandits, Kvothe encounters Felurian.

Felurian

Oh Felurian. Where to begin.

Felurian is that staple of fantasy novels, the deadly naked sex monster. She's the most beautiful, most alluring, most sexually attractive woman you'll ever see, and she will totally kill you with sex.

Felurian is the sirens, and Artemis and pretty much every other sex-death-nudity chick from mythology or fiction rolled into one. Kvothe catches her, bones her, breaks free of her sex-death-nudity mind control, completely whips her ass in a straight fight, then bones her again, then plays music that makes her think he's awesome, then writes half a song about her that is so awesome that she agrees to let him go so that he can finish it, then disses her sexual prowess, which prompts her to get really insecure and tell him what an amazing lover he is, then they have sex some more, then she sews him a magic cloak, while he goes away and talks to a prophetic tree which turns out to be evil.

Then they have sex some more, then he comes back to the real world and is all “bros, I totally did it with Felurian” and everybody is all like “no way, you'd be mad or dead” and he's like “no I totally did it with Felurian” and then the hot barmaid from earlier is all like “no he's definitely telling the truth because I am a woman and I can see that he has got totally sexed up since we last met, because I tried to sex him and it freaked him out, but now it looks like he wouldn't be freaked out and also he would be totally awesome at sexing.” Then Kvothe does sex with the hot barmaid and he is totally awesome at it, and he explains how doing sex with the hot barmaid is totally as good as doing sex with Felurian, because women are like music and sometimes you want to listen to a beautiful symphony and sometimes you just want a nice simple jig, and by the way this definitely isn't sexist, and if you think it is then you know nothing about music or love or him.

This last line, apart from being switched from the first to the third person, is a direct quote from the book.

So yeah, Felurian.

I should repeat that apart from a few misgivings, the Vintas segments of The Wise Man's Fear did actually convince me that I'd misjudged the book, that pacing issues aside it was going to turn out okay. The Felurian section convinced me that what I was dealing with was the worst kind of third-rate wish-fulfilment crap.

Here is the exchange between Kvothe and Felurian after he finishes his half-finished song (a song, I should add, which is included in full in the text, and which both Kvothe and Felurian describe as having beautiful words – a claim I would hesitate to make about anything I had written myself, particularly if it was incidental music for my fantasy novel):

Some of the fire left her, but when she found her voice it was tight and dangerous. “my skills 'suffice'?” She hardly seemed able to force out the last word. Her mouth formed a thin, outraged line. I exploded, my voice a roll of thunder. “How the hell am I supposed to know? It's not like I've ever done this sort of thing before!” She reeled back at the vehemence of my words, some of the anger draining out of her. “what is it you mean?” she trailed off, confused. “This!” I gestured awkwardly at myself, at her, at the cushions and the pavilion around us, as if that explained everything. The last of the anger left her as I saw realization begin to dawn, “you...” “No,” I looked down, my face growing hot. “I have never been with a woman.” Then I straightened and looked her in the eye as if challenging her to make an issue of it.” Felurian was still for a moment, then let her mouth turn up into a wry smile. “you tell me a faerie story, my kvothe.” I felt my face go grim. I don't mind being called a liar. I am. I am a marvellous liar. But I hate being called a liar when I'm telling the perfect truth. Regardless of my motivation, my expression seemed to convince her. “but you were like a gentle summer storm.” She made a fluttering gesture with a hand. “you were a dancer fresh upon the field.” Her eyes glittered wickedly.

That's right, Kvothe was so amazing at doing sex that the ancient sex goddess of sex and death was actually unable to believe that he was a virgin because he was so amazing at doing sex.

Once again, I say this. The next time you hear anybody complain about the fact that – in certain popular novels targeted at young women – hundred year old vampires fall for sixteen year old schoolgirls, point out to them that in one of the most critically acclaimed fantasy novels of the twenty-first century a faery creature of unbridled sexual potency, as ancient as time itself, who lures men to their deaths with her irresistible beauty and insatiable lovemaking has her mind blown by the sexual prowess of a sixteen year old virgin.

There is a part of me, a tiny part, which respects the sheer brass bollocks of this. Not only does Kvothe get to live out the adolescent fantasy of being taught how to be amazing at sex by a fantastically hot older woman (and I understand and appreciate this fantasy, and don't think there's anything wrong with it – adolescent fantasies are important, even for grownups, hell that's why I play RPGs and read genre fiction) but said hot older woman takes the time out at the start of the whole sequence to make it very clear both to him and to the reader that he was already amazing at sex and that all her tuition will be doing is making him even more amazing at sex.

Also what is up with her not using capitalization. What does that even sound like?

As part of the Felurian interlude Kvothe encounters a prophetic tree, which Bast interrupts the story to tell us is the most dangerous thing ever because it has absolute knowledge of the future and is utterly malicious, and therefore if you encounter it your every action will bring nothing but destruction (this is clearly a nonsensical idea, and is dropped into the middle of the text without ceremony or foreshadowing and I have no idea if we're even supposed to take it seriously). The whole faery interlude just came so totally out of left field and turned the story on its head in ways that felt annoying and unsatisfying. It introduced a whole bunch of concepts that didn't really have any buildup, and it transformed Kvothe's story from a story about a clever, resourceful man whose reputation grew far beyond the reality to the story of a man who really was just all that and a bag of chips. Suddenly he went from being somebody who did great things, and to whom legendary powers were attributed, to somebody who really did just have access to ancient powerful magic for no clear reason.

To put it another way, at the start of this review, I quoted the “I have stolen princesses back from sleeping barrow kings...” section from the first book. In The Name of the Wind we see that when Kvothe “burned down the town of Trebon” what really happened was that the town was burned down by a rampaging Draccus (a creature which itself was the mundane source of a fantastical rumour) while Kvothe was in the area for other reasons. This engaged cleverly with the novel's central themes.

In The Wise Man's Fear we deal with the “I have spent the night with Felurian” section of the speech. Unlike the town of Trebon, where the truth behind the story is both more mundane and more interesting than the version that is repeated in legend, the story of Kvothe's night with Felurian is just – well – exactly what it says on the tin. There's no clever twist or double meaning, no unexpected subversion of our expectations. He just really did do something which he totally shouldn't have been able to do, and looked awesome while doing it, and got to have loads of sex with a really really hot woman who by the way thought he was awesome at sex. It's not clever, it's not illuminating, it's just pathetic.

Ademre

I really do think that the Felurian sequence broke the book for me. Part of this is that my perception of Kvothe and the text in general shifted so fundamentally after the utterly facepalm-worthy faery sequence. Part of it is that once he's been initiated into the mysteries of womanhood by Felurian, Kvothe suddenly starts to have a whole lot of sex.

Once Kvothe has been taught to be awesome at sex by Felurian (but just so it's clear, he was already awesome at sex, this is very important) he then gets taught to be awesome at fighting. Thus becoming the best man ever.

In the world of the Kingkiller Chronicles there exists a kingdom (or an area of land at least) called Ademre. Ademre is one of those spurious fantasy cultures that seems to have a totally martial-arts based economy. They follow a philosophical thingy called “the Lethani” and study awesome martial arts that, of course, make them better at fighting than everybody else in the world. They then go into the world as mercenaries where they make a fortune being awesome at fighting, most of which they send back to their homeland, where it goes to support their otherwise extremely poor countrymen.

Kvothe travels with an Adem mercenary as part of his work for the Maer of Vint and, because everybody who meets Kvothe either takes an instant irrational dislike to him or treats him like he's the most important person in the universe, this mercenary initiates Kvothe into the secrets of the Lethani, and begins to instruct him in Adem martial techniques. It is worth pointing out at this point that doing either of these things is about the most horrific cultural taboo his society has, and is punishable by death or excommunication from the Adem (which the Adem, being the Noble Warrior Culture naturally consider to be a fate far worse than death).

The Adem discover that Kvothe has been taught their secrets, and he and his mercenary friend are summoned to Ademre to face judgement. They talk to Kvothe and he impresses them with how completely awesome he is and how he totally groks the Lethani even though he was only introduced to the concept about three weeks ago.

So because it's totally forbidden to share the secrets of the Lethani with people outside the Adem, but because Kvothe is apparently totally “of the Lethani” because he totally understands what this complicated philosophical concept is all about because of how awesome he is the only option that the Adem have open to them is to teach Kvothe to be totally awesome at fighting.

Of course.

The Adem, as it turns out, have a matriarchal society, for which Rothfuss scores precisely one point (he did not, at least, assume that it was impossible for women to have a prominent role in a warrior culture). He promptly loses that point for explaining that the reason the Adem have a matriarchal society is that their martial art is all about control and women are so much calmer and more sensible than men, because men are just so aggressive.

It also turns out that the Adem have no cultural taboos about nudity or sex. This of course leads to an intricate and profoundly well realised exploration of the ways in which our cultural notions of … oh who am I kidding. This is an excuse for Kvothe to have sex with a bunch of hot women who want to have sex with him because he is so awesome. Also there are no STDs in their culture because they all have sex with each other all the time, and obviously if your culture is based on rampant unprotected sex, it must be impossible for anybody in your culture to get an STD, because then STDs would spread around your population really fast, and obviously that couldn't happen, so they must all just be totally disease free. QED. Just to be clear, I'm not extrapolating here, this is exactly how it is explained as working in the book. At no point does Kvothe ever receive a sexual proposition from anybody he does not find attractive, and there is no engagement at all with the question of homosexuality.

So Kvothe gets taught to be awesome at fighting. To be fair, he does very clearly wind up being much less good at fighting than any of the actual Adem, there's a comedy sequence in which he gets his ass handed to him by a ten year old girl (although I kind of felt that this undermined the earlier point about how women in Ademre are better fighters than men – because we're clearly supposed to find the fact that Kvothe is beaten up by a girl funny and faintly emasculating, which makes the Adem's supposed respect for women warriors ring rather hollow). At the same time it's very clear that his two months of training in Ademre are going to make him better at fighting than anybody he is ever actually likely to get into a fight with, except for supernatural beings.

I think what bugged me most about the Ademre section was that it felt like this entire culture existed purely to provide an excuse for Kvothe to get good at fighting. These people who are utterly mistrustful of outsiders, incredibly paranoid about their secrets, and grounded in a social and philosophical ideals that Kvothe clearly finds completely alien never the less happily teach him their greatest secrets and formally initiate him into their society, and they do all of this despite the fact that he never shows even the slightest sign of having internalized (or even of remotely respecting) the ideals of the Adem. He never, for example, seems to get over his habit of assuming that women are inherently less capable fighters than men (he feels particularly embarrassed at being beaten up by a young girl and later on he massacres a group of bandits and feels particularly guilty about the fact that they had two women with them).

To put it another way, the overwhelming impression I got from The Name of the Wind was that while over the course of the novel, Kvothe acquired a great many skills, he didn't actually learn anything. He acquires awesome sex skills from Felurian, but doesn't learn anything about interacting with women except how to get what he wants out of them. He acquires awesome martial-arts skills from the Adem, but doesn't learn to really appreciate or understand their culture (except insofar as he comes to appreciate the benefits of being surrounded by hot women who treat sex as little more than a handshake). He doesn't really grow or change or develop in any meaningful way, he just gets more powerful – he's like the protagonist in a CRPG: he wanders around doing arbitrary-seeming quests and unlocking more powers. In every meaningful sense, the Kvothe who returns from Ademre at the end of The Wise Man's Fear is exactly the same as the Kvothe who was homeless on the streets of Tarbean in The Name of the Wind.

Denna

Something I've avoided talking about thus far is Denna. Denna is Kvothe's love interest.

I'm really not sure what to say about Denna. Kvothe meets her early in the first book, and then she's in and out of his life like the wind (oh do you see). Kvothe's love for Denna is pretty much his biggest drive in the book – even more so than his pursuit of the Chandrian, which is frankly lacklustre at times. Basically it's your traditional Nice Guy Protagonist in love with Mysterious High Class Prostitute story – it's sort of like Moulin Rouge or Mal/Inara in Firefly. They have lots of conversations in which she tells him how much she values him and how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control her and tie her down, and Kvothe spends a lot of time narrating to himself how brilliant it is that he isn't like other guys who just want to control Denna and tie her down. Meanwhile he spends the majority of his free time fantasising about how great it could be if he could control her and tie her down.

Okay, that's slightly unfair, but only slightly. In this type of narrative in general, the mistake writers wind up making is always in presenting the problem as strategic in nature. Try to tie the girl down, and she'll run away, so it's more practical to take a softly-softly approach so that you can get what you want. The notion that what the girl herself wants might enter into the equation is always rather a side issue. It is taken for granted that Kvothe will only be able to truly “be with” Denna if he can get her to stop running and stay with him – he never even considers the possibility that they could have a relationship in which she simply retains the independence she seems to value so highly.

I don't think the Denna thing would bother me if it weren't for the fact that Rothfuss' women are so uniformly … fneh. Pre-Felurian, they're basically all desexualised and childlike (like Auri, the quirky pixie girl who lives in the Underthing) or else Mysterious Gatekeepers Of The Mystic Lands of The Sex (like Fela, Devi, and all of the other hot women who fancy Kvothe without him realizing). Post-Felurian, the Mystery has gone out of the non-childlike women, but the Gatekeepers of the Lands of The Sex they remain.

I don't want to make too big a thing out of this (particularly since if I did this would apparently be evidence that I knew nothing about music, or love, or Patrick Rothfuss) The Kingkiller Chronicles is just generally not great for women. It has a fair few female characters in it who are interesting, but their interestingness is somewhat undermined by their total obsession with (which always includes sexual interest in) Kvothe.

In Conclusion: Follow Through

The Kingkiller Chronicles is a serious Fantasy series for serious Fantasy readers. I know it is, because it keeps telling me it is.

Each volume opens and closes with a section called A Silence of Three Parts, this chapter is always slightly different, but it always ends with the following line:

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

It's this line that sets my expectations for the series. It will be serious, it will be melancholy, it will chart the tragedy of a man who did great and terrible things.

But it has no follow through.

So he gets expelled from the university, but it in no way stops him accessing the university. He's poor, but never so poor that he can't afford everything he could possibly need. He's of low birth, but nobody who isn't clearly evil reacts badly to him because of it. He wanders blithely into faerie and is none the worse for wear. He encounters a society in which everybody has casual, unprotected sex with everybody else, and this apparently creates a society completely free of sexually transmitted diseases. He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.

The Wise Man's Fear is nine hundred and ninety four pages of setup, foreshadowing and copout. Kvothe wanders a world which exists only as a backdrop for him, and interacts with people who exist only to flatter him (either with their irrational hatred or their equally irrational adoration). It is a shallow, superficial text pandering to shallow, superficial fantasies. If it was three hundred pages shorter, and less portentously written, I'd recommend it unreservedly as a way to indulge your inner fourteen-year-old.

I have no doubt that The Wise Man's Fear will take its place alongside The Name of the Wind in the canon of modern Fantasy. I'll just sit here with my palm over my face.

Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

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~Comments (

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Wardog

at 19:27 on 2011-04-13I, wow, fail.

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Melissa G.

at 20:25 on 2011-04-13*facepalm*

No, really, that's kind of all I've got. I'm just sort of sitting here going, "I-what-but-it..." *throws up hands and walks away*

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Orion

at 20:48 on 2011-04-13My first reaction was to smugly proclaim that I've already written the story Name of the Wind evidently pretended to be--which is true. I was 14, so it was terrible for other reasons, but I like to think I stuck to the "myth is less than reality" thing pretty effectively.

My second was to realize, to my shame, that I also wrote most of the story Wise Man's Fear apparently is. This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 20:52 on 2011-04-13Why does the cover appear to feature a Jedi?

I'm sorry but you do not get to bore my tits off with trivialities for three hundred and sixty pages (for those of you keeping score at home that's twenty pages more than the entirety of The God of Small Things)

Oh my god

The God of Small Things.

A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.

See, I never read the first Kingkiller book because it sounded precisely like the stuff I'd hate, but people keep raving on and on about it and I don't get it. Even the backcover bit sounds incredibly obnoxious: "oho look how clever I am by LAMPSHADING my GARY STU qualities. SEE? SEEEEE."

Jesus that post-coital exchange. No one can convince me to read Rothfuss. Ever. Ever. This, this right here? This is shit writing. This is stupid writing. Anyone who praises Rothfuss as whatever can go take a leap.

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Dan H

at 22:20 on 2011-04-13

Oh my god The God of Small Things. A viable die-able age. HOW EVERYONE SHOULD BE LOVED AND HOW MUCH. Fffffffuuuu that book.

Is that a "I hated God of Small Things" or an "I really liked God of Small Things"? I kind of can't tell.

It's very clever-clever, I thought that the first book just about got away with it, but the second just spiralled into a pit of stupid.

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Dan H

at 23:47 on 2011-04-13

This has me wondering: is the "wish-fulfillment" angle separable from the "sexism" one? If you've committed yourself to a hypertalented male protagonist whose powerset explicitly includes charisma, do you just stop pretending to care about authentic depictions of women, or what?

The glib answer to "is wish fulfillment separable from sexism" is "only if you have sexist wishes."

To be more specific and hopefully more helpful, I think it depends on how your handle your character's charisma. Just because somebody is charismatic, that doesn't mean that women have to throw themselves at him (any more than it means men have to throw themselves at him - assuming your character isn't so supernaturally gorgeous that they overcome people's sexuality, it seems reasonable that they wouldn't overcome people's general preferences either). Writing charismatic characters in *general* is really hard, because they can easily come across as somebody people like for no particular reason (like John Sheridan or for that matter Kvothe).

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http://koboldwhisperer.livejournal.com/

at 02:32 on 2011-04-14Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade

loved it.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 07:10 on 2011-04-14I hated

The God of Small Things

like burning, random incest and all.

koboldwhisperer: hurrgh Gabe and Tycho. What a pair of toxic wads.

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Arthur B

at 10:02 on 2011-04-14

Now yes, it takes a lot out of him and yes, he actually does it using “sympathy” not what Kvothe thinks of as “real” magic but since to a real-world reader as well as to pretty much everybody in the actual setting, sympathy is real magic anyway, the distinction is somewhat lost.

Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about

sympathetic magic

? Or is sympathy something different from that?

Either way: wow, this sounds shit. At least Moorcock (on his better days) had the decency to give his wish-fulfilment figures a hard time. Yes, Elric is teh sex and is good at fighting and magic and is really smart, but early on in his career he's really kind of a terrible person, later on he wants to change but is already too dependent on Stormbringer to rid himself of it, and eventually he's completely unable to protect anyone or anything he loves when it really counts. Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to

fail

at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?

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Dan H

at 10:24 on 2011-04-14

Wait, is Rothfuss seriously suggesting that there's nothing magical about sympathetic magic? Or is sympathy something different from that?

There's a little bit more to it than that - Rothfuss' "sympathy" is quasi-scientific in a way that's actually quite interesting (it obeys conservation of energy, involves calculus and is treated by the people who study it as a form of engineering which it sort of is). "Real" magic is Naming, which is the proper "do anything and blow anything up" type of magic.

Uhg, this sounds horrible. And surprise, surprise, the guys at Penny-Arcade loved it.

To be fair, the actual cartoon looks more like it's mocking the book than praising it. I mean the title is "when Larry met Mary" which I sort of assume is implying that Kvothe comes out as a Mary Sue version of Leisure Suit Larry.

They might have *also* really liked it, but the cartoon is actually pretty spot on.

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Wardog

at 10:28 on 2011-04-14If you have sex with two ninjas have you come before you even knew they were there...*boom-tish*

Generally very much NOT a fan of PA but I did like the cartoon - even if they liked the book, at least they were vaguely aware of its absurdity.

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Dan H

at 10:37 on 2011-04-14Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.

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Arthur B

at 10:41 on 2011-04-14

>Actually what I find really weird about the reaction on Penny Arcade is that Gabe at least seems to have been unremittingly positive about the book despite not actually liking anything about it.

Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?

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Dan H

at 11:00 on 2011-04-14

Sort of justifies the title of this article, doesn't it?

One might almost have suspected it of being deliberate...

I'm rather pleased that Thomas Wagner over at SFReviews.net

shares many of my misgivings

- he also opens with a particularly cringeworthy list of quotes from other reviewers which would have been hilarious if it wasn't so indicative.

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Ash

at 11:09 on 2011-04-14I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called

skraelings

Seriously, how hard can it be to put your made-up and not-so-made-up names in a search engine and see what turns out?

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Dan H

at 16:09 on 2011-04-14

I'm really, really glad I decided to not read these books after I learned they involved 'demons' called skraelings.

Ooh dear, that isn't good at all.

Worse, I doubt that it was wholly accidental, Rothfuss is clearly interested in etymology, so it makes me think he *probably* did it at least semi-deliberately.

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Ash

at 18:45 on 2011-04-14How the hell do you do something like that accidentally on purpose? WHY the hell do you do something like that?

It just baffles me that no one called him out on his shit.

He's not getting a penny from me until he apologises. And maybe not eveen then.

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Dan H

at 18:48 on 2011-04-14I suspect the way you do it accidentally on purpose is you find out that there's a term that appears in Icelandic sagas which means roughly "thin, scrawny things" and is used in lines like: "After the first winter summer came, and they became aware of Skrælings, who came out of the forest in a large flock" (thanks Wiki) and you think "hey, that's a cool name for my thin, scrawny alien creatures that are going to come out of the forest in a large flock in the first book". You just forget that it's also basically a racial slur.

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Ash

at 19:58 on 2011-04-14I don't think the term itself is a racial slur (although I admit I only knew of the 'written skin' etymology), it's just its use in this context that's particularly wtf.

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Arthur B

at 21:36 on 2011-04-14To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Though it doesn't sound like it's worth reading through thousands of pages of that stuff to find out whether that's the case.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 22:22 on 2011-04-14

To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Lord, even if there weren't--I'm guessing each book averages at over 900 pages each--nearly 3,000 pages between you and that reveal, I'd still be hard-pressed to imagine anything more asinine. It's not even a major part of the plot after all, is it?

Ash: heh, pennies. I've torrented books by terrible writers before for lulz, but when I actually loaded up the files to read, I discovered I had no interest in going past page two. There is such a thing as authors so off-putting that they aren't even worth reading for free. Also considering Rothfuss is currently a genre darling, the chances of anyone calling him out on either this thing or his female characters is slim to none. But hell, the latter happened to Joe Abercrombie, so maybe there's hope (and he even wrote slightly better female characters after the fact, though that's not saying much).

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Dan H

at 22:59 on 2011-04-14

To be fair, he could be setting up some sort of reveal that the Skraelings are totally human after all.

Since the Skraelings are eight-legged and crablike, that would be quite the twist, particularly since they're a throwaway in book one.

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

at 01:05 on 2011-04-15I've always wondered about all the praise people heap on this series because to me it sounds just like another example of male wish-fulfillment in epic fantasy and epic fantasy suffers from no lack of it.

What gets me is when people rush to squeal and drool over male epic fantasy authors like Rothfuss for their originality and bravery and marginalize the women who write epic fantasy and dark medieval fantasy by refusing to discuss their books or dismissing them as "women's stories" which is so ignorant it makes me want to scream.

Carol Berg has three complete epic fantasy series to her name, but how many people have heard of her? K.J. Taylor has written a dark fantasy trilogy with a villain protagonist, a unique medieval setting, and successful deconstruction of the special animal companion/chosen human relationship so prevalent in fantasy (It benefits the griffins as much is does the humans, politics and class play an important role in who a griffin chooses as their human companion, they don't adore human beings unconditionally, etc.), but how many people even know that it exists? What about Michelle West and her Sun Sword series? I only found out about it by reading a blog post by the author herself linked by Carol Berg to her own blog.

All the series above have their flaws, but while most critics either play up the flaws and ignore the things that the author does right (Michelle West) or ignore them altogether (K.J. Taylor, Carol Berg for a long time), they rush to gloss over the flaws of male authors like Rothfuss and Martin and I'm just sick of it.

Sarah Micklem's books

Firethorn

and

Widlfire

are books about a red-headed peasant girl who manages to have a knight fall in love with her, has fire magic gifted to her by the gods and has an extensive knowledge of herbs and healing. It's also a dark medieval fantasy that isn't afraid to hurt its protagonist and make her and everyone around her suffer. it's well-regarded critically, but it's not nearly praised as Martin or Rothfuss's fantasy series. Just a warning, there is a rape early on the first book, but I thought that the author handled it well. It's one the few fantasy series that manages to tackle medieval misogyny without making me want to throw a cluebat at the author. YMMV though.

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http://cofax7.livejournal.com/

at 05:54 on 2011-04-15

Or like Sherwood Smith and Kate Elliott, both of whom are writing the kind of complex, meaty, plot-heavy stories with strong world-building that the fans and critics purport to love. Except neither of them get anywhere near the kind of press that people like Rothfuss and Martin do.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 10:47 on 2011-04-15Since we're going there, what about NK Jemisin's

100K Kingdoms

? Yeine doesn't tick all the boxes: she only gets the "hot sex with creator god," "chosen for special destiny before she was born" and "chieftain of her tribe despite exhibiting no leadership skills whatsoever" down (can't recall her age but I think he's in her early twenties, tops? Nineteen maybe?), but by the end of her story she turns into an honest-to-goodness creator deity. Jemisin is taken pretty seriously by critics as well as sf/f fans, and was nominated for the Nebula. Popular opinion of her writing is overwhelmingly, absolutely positive; she's praised for amazing world-building and characterization and super-duper-clever framing narrative.

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Dan H

at 11:06 on 2011-04-15So we're rapidly coming to the conclusion that, in fact, the SF/F community will embrace silly Mary-Sue characters regardless of gender?

That's fairly positive, I suppose.

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http://winterfox.livejournal.com/

at 11:37 on 2011-04-15It's more progressive than "the SF/F community will embrace silly Sues when they're male but decry their female counterparts," I guess? Yeine's even black!

(Despite my low, low opinion of Jemisin's novels I didn't actually think Yeine was a Sue--my problems with those books lay elsewhere--but when you sit down and list all her characteristics...)

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Ash

at 12:57 on 2011-04-15I was under the impression that The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms was successful because it was a novel with a PoC protagonist written by a PoC author that came out just after RaceFail09.

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http://gareth-rees.livejournal.com/

at 13:45 on 2011-04-15An alternative theory. The fan fiction community skews female, and it's the fan writers and critics who put the spotlight on Mary Sue. So it should not surprise us that Meyer's audience were quicker to identify and comment on the wish-fulfilment aspects of her work than Rothfuss's audience.

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 16:09 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black

, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)

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Dan H

at 17:10 on 2011-04-15

Yeine definitely is not black, but she is a person of color, so the point still stands. (I'm linking to the article that underlines why I felt the need to point that out.)

I really can't get my head around the idea of an African-American fiction section *at all*. I mean maybe I'm hopelessly naive but I'm pretty sure we don't have anything like that in this country (although to be fair and less laurel-resty that might be because of a tendency to leave black writers and characters out of bookstores entirely, rather than as a result of a more enlightened view of race politics).

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 17:18 on 2011-04-15Once upon a time it was useful. Now it's just an excellent way to make sure that black writers only get read by black readers -- less than 12 percent of the U.S popluation -- and therefore have a drastically reduced shelf like, reinforcing the idea that "black books don't sell." It is THE main reason I'm not weeping over the closure of Borders here -- they seem to be the last bastion of such a section, where I live.

Barnes and Noble have an "African-American Interest" section, but it's in with all the other sociology and anthroplogy sections, like Native American History and Judaica. Their fiction is categorized by, y'know,

category,

not race of author.

At one point, my local Borders was lumping Zane's erotica and "urban fiction," James Baldwin's novels AND essays, Octavia Butler, and Barack Obama's memoir together on the same shelf. (One shelf that was very close to the register to keep Us Folk from stealin'. Sigh.)

I went to a manager about it, and she gave me the most crestfallen look ever and told me that they had all tried, but it was a decision of the higher-ups.

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http://cammalot.livejournal.com/

at 17:37 on 2011-04-15(Oh, and yeah, I never saw that kind of thing in the U.K. either, not even in Borders. Granted, I haven't made an exhaustive study of the U.K. or anything.)

The funny thing about Borders here, too? Black British authors -- and Afro Caribbean, if I remember correctly -- were shelved right in with the "normal" fiction. (As were South Asian authors, Korean authors, South American, et cetera...) I definitely found Mike Gayle and the novel "Small Island" in with the mainstream fiction.

But I'm betting the U.K. publishing industry has undergone an entirely different sort of evolution. You'll still find, here, that some of the loudest advocates of having an Af Am section are African Americans, who want to have a shelf that "our children can look at, and feel proud, and know that they can accomplish things."

Which

was

in fact useful when I was a kid in the '70s. But now it hits the writers in the pocket and stands in the way of some of the social advances we need -- a greater variety of people writing a greater variety of experience (rather than depending on white writers to "get it right" all the time). We touched on that in the "Demon's Covenant" discussion.

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http://kellicat.livejournal.com/

at 20:56 on 2011-04-15I remembered N.K. Jemisin after I posted my comment, but unfortunately I can't remember any other women writing epic fantasy who's been embraced by fans and critics to the same extent so for now she stands as an exception to the general rule. Whether she represents a new trend or whether the fans will just go back to praising white men epic fantasy remains to be seen.

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Robinson L

at 15:06 on 2011-05-25

He rescues two girls from a gang of rapists, and briefly muses that they will now be unable to find husbands, but when he returns them to their home village virtually everybody expresses a twenty-first century, non-victim-blaming attitude.

The really depressing part is that even in the twenty-first century, such an attitude is still the exception rather than the rule.

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http://conquestsong.blogspot.com/

at 23:29 on 2011-07-01Excellent rant, you summed up everything I disliked about WMF and TNotW. I think Rothfuss has that gift where his writing is easy to read / easy to get sucked into -- thus, people rarely recognize or shrug away how shopworn and/or stupid the content actually is.

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Dan H

at 01:11 on 2011-07-02He's certainly very readable (he'd have to be given how *stupidly long* his work is) and I'd feel much, much more positive about his books if they weren't so critically acclaimed. Which I suppose boils down to a churlish sounding "I'd like this more if other people like it less" but - yeah, it's quite good for silly wish-fulfillment, but it's not the great work of lit-ter-at-ture that people are claiming it is.

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Steve Stirling at 07:47 on 2011-07-13Michelle West is definitely an awesome fantasy writer. Very cool person, too.

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.

BTW, the really creepy thing about TWILIGHT is not that the sixteen-year-old girl can totally charm the centuries-old vampire.

It's that a guy centuries old is still hanging around high school. Christ, I shook the dust of secondary education from my feet just as fast as I could.

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Arthur B

at 11:42 on 2011-07-13

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf. The question is how well it's done.

I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)

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Dan H

at 15:00 on 2011-07-13

Yeah, Kvothe is a wish-fulfillment, but so what? So are Odysseus and Beowulf.

That's a fine soundbite, but I strongly suspect that it's also meaningless nonsense.

How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment? Unless you're defining "wish-fulfillment" as "any narrative in which the protagonist possesses admirable qualities". For that matter I'm not even sure if the Ancient Greek or Anglo-Saxon mindset could even *accommodate* the concept of "wish fulfillment" as you or I understand it.

Whose wishes is Beowulf supposed to be fulfilling? Those of the Anglo-Saxons who originally told the story? Those of the monks who transcribed it and put in all the spurious Jesus references? Those of Ray Winstone?

I'd also point out that you're not really presenting an argument here. My complaint about the book is that it is NOTHING BUT juvenile wish-fulfillment. Even if we accept for the moment your assertion that Beowulf and the Odyssey contain ELEMENTS of wish-fulfilment that doesn't address the problem. If you make me a sandwich with no filling, and I complain that it contains nothing but bread, saying "all sandwiches contain bread" doesn't really address my complaint.

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Orion

at 18:21 on 2011-07-13Yeah, I can't get behind Odysseus as a wish fulfillment character either. He gets very little of what he wants over the course of his life, he solves only a handful of crises with his own talents, and frequently has to give up appealing things in the name of duty.

Okay, he does get to sex up a few supernatural women, but even those sex scenes are framed as disturbing and unpleasant experiences.

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Steve Stirling at 19:00 on 2011-07-13

I think Dan has made a very coherent case here that it's not done very well at all. :)

-- sure. Actually I agree with that; my point was that a Mary Sue isn't a bad thing -as such-.

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Steve Stirling at 19:04 on 2011-07-13

How, precisely, are Odysseus and Beowulf wish-fulfillment?

-- "Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.

Of course, Achilles is wish-fulfillment too (Alexander the Great consciously modeled his life on him) but in a rather different sense. You might say that between them they encompassed different aspects of the Greek ideal man.

Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...

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Cammalot

at 19:32 on 2011-07-13Isn't the Mary Sue phenomenon a function of bad writing by definition? Competence or even superness isn't Sueness by default. The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.

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Wardog

at 19:58 on 2011-07-13

"Me, but much better". Odysseus is the "man of cunning mind", the omnicompetent all-rounder who can do everything pretty well, even if not as well as the specialists.

You seem to be looking at fictional constructs, who perform symbolic and cultural functions as well as literal ones, as RPG characters. I'm not sure you can look at characters from other times through a modern day lens - although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them, ultimately it's neither a helpful nor a useful way to interpret ancient texts. They're not actually the superhero comics of their day.

Beowulf is what a noble Anglo-Saxon of the warrior class wanted to be -- lucky, strong enough to rip a troll's arm off, fearless, honored by all men, faithful to his oaths...

The who? The what? For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone. And although I'm personally amused by the idea of a bunch of thanes sitting around the camp fire going "Hey, shaper, tell us the one about the guy who failed to kill a dragon like all the other mythic heroes, and who left no legacy whatsoever because in the face of time all men are futile and weak because we totally want to be that guy" I can't readily imagine it.

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Orion

at 20:20 on 2011-07-13I've always thought that the important part of a wish fulfillment character wasn't that they had astounding personal qualities, but rather that they were able to use those qualities to, well, fulfill wishes. In fact I'd go so far as to say that having the positive qualities is only a means to the end, because there are wish fulfillment characters with no discernible positive qualities who get to live the dream through luck or contrivance (Bella Swan).

So show me an omnicompetent person, and I'm not going to call them a wish-fulfillment character unless they also gets to live a good life. Now, I recognize that what counts as a good life is a little complicated. Plenty of wish-fulfillment heroes spend most of their time in dire circumstances having supposedly horrible things happen to them, but because it's fantasy violence and fantasy suffering we don't care overmuch. What matters is whether the scenes where they get to live the dream are there and how those scenes are presented.

So looking at whether the Odyssey would work as a wish-fulfillment story for a modern audience (setting aside the question of how the Greeks would have read it), the evidence breaks down something like this:

Pro: Rules a kingdom, wins a war, has a beautiful and devoted wife, has the favor of the gods.

Con: Separated from his home for 20 years, rather more cursed than blessed on the whole, doomed to leave home AGAIN after returning and die in a foreign land.

Pro: Sexes up goddesses, outwits monsters, wins archery contest through special gifts.

Con: Doesn't seem to be attracted to most of the women he meets, has to give up the one potentially appealing one (Nausicaa), and genereally feels harried and put upon more than triumphant and cocky.

Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.

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Steve Stirling at 20:40 on 2011-07-13

The plot warping its way around the character in defiance of logic, believeability, and reasonable genre conventions makes a Sue. If it's well done, it's not a Sue situation anymore.

-- I see your point, but disagree.

What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?

You're valorizing the conventions of Modernist fiction; but those are just conventions.

They're not even particularly "realistic" in any real sense; just pinched, narrow and self-obsessed in a sort of pickle-up-the-ass way.

Take a look at the careers of Genghis Khan or Tamerlane or Cortez or Pizzaro. Leaving aside the supernatural element, they're every bit as fantastic and full of outrageous coincidences and victories against incredible odds and acts of insane daring and so forth as most fantasy fiction.

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Cammalot

at 20:45 on 2011-07-13

What's logical or "believable" in the career of any of the epic heroes?

But you're leaving out the part where I *very deliberately* said "reasonable genre conventions." I'm not privileging anything -- Beowulf and the Odyssey very much follow the conventions of their art form/folkloric patterns, etc.

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Steve Stirling at 20:50 on 2011-07-13Kyra:

although you might argue that there's century-spanning human trait, which involves looking at imaginary people and wishing we were like them,

-- when archaelogists dug the site of Mari, a city destroyed by Hammurabi of Babylon in around 1800 BCE, they found an unopened (clay envelope around a clay tablet) letter.

Breaking the envelope, they read the words that no human eye had seen for over 3000 years.

It began: "This is the third letter I have written you about the silver you owe me for the sheep..."

Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.

For what it's worth, Beowulf - in the form we have it - was archaic even its day. If it was about a warrior culture, which I think, on balance it probabably wasn't, it was about a warrior culture already long gone.

-- certain -aspects- of it were archaic; it's obviously been de-paganized a bit.

(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)

But the basic social system was that with which a 10th-century Anglo-Saxon audience would have been familiar; the lord, his sworn companions, the hall, the symbolic exchange of gifts, and so forth. The dragons and trolls were just cool exciting stuff to make it more exotic and exciting.

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending. Well, ancient Germanic poetry, natch.

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Steve Stirling at 20:57 on 2011-07-13Life Imitates Art division: when Cortez' men came over the pass and saw the Aztec cities below them, with their pyramids and canals and palaces and hummingbird-feather cloaks, the first thing they said to each other was:

"This is just like "Amadis of Gaul"!"

"Amadis" was a late-medieval romance full of valliant knights, wicked sorcerors, heroic quests, and beautiful princesses. The sort of thing your average penniless would-be hidalgo whiled away the hours with.

These guys were living out a heroic-fantasy, sword-and-sorcery adventure in their own heads (complete with evil priests). LARPing fanboys with Toledo swords shedding real blood.

Art Imitates Life: The Kull/Conan story that Howard wrote about the assassination attempt with the mad poet and so forth is taken, almost word for word (right down to the hastily-donned armor not laced up at the side) from the death of Pizzaro.

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Steve Stirling at 21:08 on 2011-07-13

Ultimately it's a judgment call, but I'm swayed more by the con points.

-- well, there's where the target audience comes in.

I found the book this all started with a little boring; not because the hero was so super, but because he wasn't -tested- enough.

(Incidentally, this is the basic reason you have to be careful in what abilities you give your protagonist -- you have to have the appropriate kryptonite waiting. It's also a drawback when you finally make him/her the ruler or whatever; after that, life is mosty meetings and reports. Not that Aragorn exits stage right after Gandalf crowns him.)

In the case of Homer, the target audience would be people who'd fought with shield and spear to the death. (An ancient Greek proverb went: "Even Hercules can't fight two.")

To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.

Also, a lot of the wish-fulfillment element was the desire to BE a hero; and a hero had to do mighty deeds and overcome terrible trials. The Greeks were just as aware as us that "adventure" was "someone else in deep shit, far away".

Because the Man from Ithaka is a mythic hero, everything he does is heightened; he doesn't just fight Illyrian pirates, he fights a Cyclops, and so forth.

Reading through the book, I did get the very strong impression that the author had never had to actually fight, for example.

Again, I'm not saying this is a good book; I'm saying it's a badly written one in some respects but that the hero's abilities aren't necessarily one of them.

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Cammalot

at 21:11 on 2011-07-13Steve, I'm not following what you're actually criticizing about the original article at all anymore.

You seem to be saying that lots of literature across time and culture contained outsized exploits and larger-than-life heroes, and so the presence of these things... makes any book good? Because I do not see Dan arguing that the presence of these things automatically makes a book bad.

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Wardog

at 21:19 on 2011-07-13

Different cultures are different, but some things are eternal. Wishing you were luckier, smarter, stronger, braver and better-looking than you are is one of them.

You can argue this point if you like, it's neither provable nor disprovable, like most of the generic statements you have brought to this discussion. However, attempting to support it by a "one size fits all" application of historical texts strikes me as absurd.

(Incidentally it can be dated to the mid-sixth century by references to historical events that got written down.)

The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.

Yeah, it has a doom-laded ending.

I would point out that the ending of a text has something on an impact of the general atmosphere. And actually it's doom-laden throughout. The ending is merely the culmination of all the futility that has gone before.

Well, yes, these are familiar tropes - but surely the way they are deployed in in the text supports my point, not yours? If you take all these elements - standard elements of heroic literature - and set about showing them to be hollow, I fail to see how this makes Beowulf the sort of dude any anglo-saxon would aspire to be? You'll be trying to tell me Brythnoth was a great king next.

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Orion

at 21:42 on 2011-07-13To be believable enough for the wish-fulfillment element to be -satisfying-, he had to put the hero through the wringer.

You seem to be conflating two types of story which, while often overlapping, ought to be conceptually separate.

Some stories get their punch from a structure that for lack of a better term I'll call redemption. (I don't mean that in a moral sense; I considered catharsis but that word has too much baggage.) In this kind of story, the protagonists main function is to suffer though a great deal of shit, which causes us to feel sympathetic towards them and be invested in finding out what happens to them. Only after the tension has been raised by setback after loss after betrayal are they allowed to win out, in an ending which the reader experiences as a euphoric relief/release.

Other stories are primarily about vicariously enjoying good things and experiences in the protagonist's life. They get to have and do the things the reader wants, and it's that pre-existing desire in the reader that makes the story compelling. This is what I would call a wish-fulfillment story.

Obviously it's possible to both in the same story. You can tell a story about someone suffering ignominously for 90% of the text and then getting a big house with a fast car and a hot spouse at the end. To some degree you can even mix techniques in the middle of a story, having your character take a quick break to shag a sex demon in between episodes of torture and failure. But I think to a certain degree they undermine each other because identifying with and sympathizing with a character are very different levels of distance.

Anyway, despite the frequent overlap, you can find examples of "pure" types if you look. Although I've never watched an entire James Bond film straight through, what I've seen leads to me think they are nearly pure wish-fulfillment stories. I've heard he gets captured and tortured occasionally, but whenever I've watched he's been confident and unfazed essentially the entire time, and he gets to enjoy fine drinks and casual sex throughout, not just at the end.

My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The main character is a bitter divorced leper who is thrown into a fantasy world where he spends most of his time being cursed or tortured, helplessly watching people die, or committing rape and then feeling bad about it. Watching him finally choose good, find his power, and defeat the big bad is satisfying because what went before was so horrible. But his reward for doing so is... going back to Earth to be a slightly less bitter but still ostracized leper. He never gets anything the typical reader wants.

I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.

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Wardog

at 22:06 on 2011-07-13

I like this game! I was very amused - I come down on Team Con as well. I do not aspire to Odysseus despite his aparently decent starting stats. Let's do Jesus next!

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Cammalot

at 22:21 on 2011-07-13

Let's do Jesus next!

Depends on if you buy the deus ex machina ending. ;-)

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Steve Stirling at 22:23 on 2011-07-13Cammalot:

-- Well, I got the impression that Dan -was- saying that enough outsized exploits -did- make it automatically bad.

My slant wasn't complete disagreement; simply that the reason the book was bad was that the hero's trials and challenges weren't -in proportion- to his abilities.

Hence the wish fulfillment element failed on its own terms because (to my mind) it's the overcoming of serious obstacles which makes the hero's ultimate triumph (or heroic death) satisfying -as- wish fulfillment.

Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?

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Steve Stirling at 22:27 on 2011-07-13

The story can, the manuscript is not, but ultimately we can't really make judgements about an oral tradition to which we don't have access because, um, it was oral.

-- Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.

The continuity over broad areas of time and space indicates that, "originally" (say in the Migration period, which is when Beowulf is "set" to the extent that it happens in the real world at all) we're looking at a single interacting culture sphere, with stories and storytellers moving from area to area.

Eg., the very late Icelandic poems contain persons and stories dating to the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries; Ermannaric the Ostrogoth, for example, or Theodoric. Or the Niebelungen legend and the breaking of the Burgund kingdom by the Huns, which originates in the Rhineland.

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Steve Stirling at 22:33 on 2011-07-13

I think the Odyssey is an almost pure redemption story with minor wish fulfillment elements.

-- I see your point, but I think you're missing the essence of the "heroic quest".

The hero doesn't just have bad shit happen to him, he has bad shit happen and deals with it -in a heroic way-.

Odysseus suffers shiprweck, etc., and meets each challenge with heroic courage, heroic cunning, etc.

That's what -makes- him a hero, and worthy of identification. That's why the audience would want to "be" him.

At the end, he gets a reward. But it isn't any the less a wish fulfillment/identification story if he dies a heroic death; because the wish is to BE a hero. And heroes die.

It is genuinely possible to ardently desire a heroic death; it just isn't as common in this culture, currently.

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Steve Stirling at 22:34 on 2011-07-13

My example "pure redemption" story would be the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

God, how I hated that book. DIE, ALREADY, YOU LOSER! was always my reaction to Covenant.

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Orion

at 22:45 on 2011-07-13I thought the article criticized the way Kvothe's abilities are presented and justified more than the fact that he has extraordinary abilities. Let's look at the two big example: fighting skills and faery interludes.

Kvothe and Achilles are both young men of mysterious origin with legendary fighting skills and powerful magic. But Achilles is the iconic hero of his culture. His fighting skills are something he would reasonably have the opportunity to learn, and his use of them (his behavior in general, in fact) is constrained by the customs and standards of his culture. Kvothe, on the other hand, somehow obtains skills which properly belong to another culture and thereafter wanders the world endowed with asskicking which his rivals have no access to and which does not come with any significant obligations.

Or look at the handling of the supernatural. The Homeric heroes may be extremely good at what they do, but when there's a god or curse or prophecy in play they have to abide by it. Achilles will die if he fights in this war, just as Kvothe will supposedly die is he sleeps with Felurian. One of them escapes their fate and the other doesn't. And when Odyseeus hooks up with Calypso, she uses him until he falls into a deep sleep and he only escapes due to divine intervention.

I don't know, maybe that's what you're getting at when you say Kvothe doesn't face big enough challenges? That Calypso is obviously "more powerful" than Felurian and Paris more skilled than anyone Kvothe fights? I guess that works, but I'd rather think of it not in terms of facing bigger challenges, but rather having to follow the rules while doing it.

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Wardog

at 22:47 on 2011-07-13

Beowulf isn't the only example of ancient Germanic heroic poetry to which we have access.

Yes, I know, but you specifically cited Beowulf as an example of historical wish-fulfillment fantasy. I have, I hope, explained why it isn't.

Indeed, these are examples of late Icelandic poems. Congratulations.

However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.

And a list of texts is not an argument as to why any of them may be interpreted as historical wish fulfillment fantasy either.

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Dan H

at 23:00 on 2011-07-13

Basically, it seemed to me that Dan was criticizing the book for not being more like a Modernist (anti-heroic) text. Perhaps I was wrong about that?

Ah, I think this is the heart of our disagreement. To an extet I *was* criticising the book for not being a modernist, anti-heroic text, because I felt that the book was *setting itself up* to be a modernist, anti-heroic text and was being treated by the SF/F community as if it *was* a modernist, anti-heroic text. I felt that only by *being* a modernist, anti-heroic text could the book begin to deal with the themes it so promisingly raised in book one.

I have absolutely nothing against pure wish-fulfillment (although I prefer it to come in packages rather smaller than 997 pages) but I don't personally find it terribly interesting, or worthy of attention.

I'd also suggest that we might be using "wish fulfillment" slightly differently. A lot of what you call "wish fulfillment" is what I would simply call "myth" - it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.

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Steve Stirling at 23:12 on 2011-07-13Orion:

-- I think we're saying pretty much the same thing here, just using different terminology.

Kvorthe's abilities are so out of proportion to the background that they break the narrative frame of the story.

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Steve Stirling at 23:19 on 2011-07-13

However, this is a *different* heroic tradition - and although it is referenced pretty explicitely in Beowulf, it is only to emphasise how Beowulf himself *differs* from these heroes.

-- I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition.

Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar. Beowulf is, after all, set in what's now Sweden and from the internal evidence was hundreds of years old when the manuscript was written down, whenever that was.

This necessarily implies that at the time Beowulf was circulating in Anglo-Saxon England, a lot of -other- stories deriving from the same corpus were too, versions of the Niebelungen story or the tale of Wayland, and quasi-historical stuff like "Burnt Finnsburg". Doubtless there were versions of Beowulf circulating in Scandinavia.

We have a (fairly) complete text of Beowulf essentially by accident; we don't have most of the others, also essentially by accident.

Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.

And the others as well.

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Steve Stirling at 23:23 on 2011-07-13

it is true that a great deal of mythology presented figures who the audience was expected to admire or aspire to be like (as do, for example, morality plays) but that is not the same as wish fulfillment, which is a more modern concept to do with appealing to the personal fantasies of its target market. It's not about providing you with a satisfying narrative in which a sympathetic character with whom you identify overcomes aversity, it's about provding you with an avatar who you can imagine yourself being, and having that avatar go through the motions of doing things you wish you could do.

-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here.

Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

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Orion

at 08:14 on 2011-07-14Jesus:

Pros: foot rubs, vintage wine, and cheap seafood. Speak before adoring audiences and travel with a dozen groupies.

Cons: celibacy, poor fashion sense, and agonizing death.

I think I have to vote "con" again.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 10:52 on 2011-07-14I think the discussion might be suffering from a confusion of terms used. Wish fulfillment as I understand it would refer to a more specific narrative ploy, which appeals directly to the reader's wish to insert themselves into the story through charecterization and titillation and whatnot. It might be a mistake to do, as Steve does to effortlessly widen wish fulfillment to mean any sense of recognition with a character in a story. Sure, if we allow this, Steve is right, because it seems clear that most(though perhaps not categorically all) stories depend on the audience's interest in the story and their recognizing the character as a person.

I don't think that such a wide use of the term is very useful or a strong argument though. If, for example we discuss the Odyssey, as somewhere above, it is surely a heroic epic where the hero is very resourceful and strong, but the very point of the story is its tragic tone in Aristotelian terms, that is a great person who is unable to escape their fate as gods or the worlds plaything. While the intended audience of Odysseia(or Ilium) are no doubt meant to be impressed by the hero and his prowess, it is very doubtful whether any one would wish to be like him. He tries to reac home after a ten year war which he was tricked into going to and because he manages to anger a godd takes ten years to reach it, while suffering horrible hardships and losing all his men and possessions besides, spending years on end as a plaything to one immortal or another. Meanwhile his son grows into a man and his wife is sieged in by suitors. Sure it has a happy ending, but the focus is not on how Odysseus is great, but rather on see how even the greatest of heroes is tossed around by the whims of powers beyond him.

And anyways as said, even if we allow that wish fulfillment is present in all stories, this just proves that it is a useless term to describe how some stories are more appealing than others. Because really if it is present in all stories, its presence is important like the words themselves, it has to be there, but it does not tell anything about the story.

I wouldn't treat the term with such a wide applicability though. Its use is more specific, as I said. In other news, the few extant germanic tales which differ from each other is hardly enough to claim such sweeping generalizations on what the audience though or expected from the stories.

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Wardog

at 10:57 on 2011-07-14

I'd say it's different flavors of the same tradition

But "tradition" in this context is so broad as to be meaningless. Do you mean texts written in Anglo Saxon? Texts from an oral tradition? You might as well say Pride and Prejudice and The Blade Itself are from the same tradition because they're written in English and printed on paper. And, yes, it's arguably true but I don't see the value in asserting it? You can find superficial similarities between any texts you like but this doesn’t make Beowulf any more historical wish-fulfilment fantasy than it was previously. Which is not at all.

Obviously they're drawing on a common pool of tropes and styles and stories, with which the creator and the audience are assumed to be familiar

See above.

Beowulf is in a coversation with the other stories. It differs in some respects, and shares others, and obviously the audience enjoyed listening to it.

See above.

Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

You seem pretty desperate to talk about Amandis of Gaul so here we go. The same argument applies here. I’ve already tried to explain why I think arbitrarily assigning 21st century perspectives to historical contexts is reductive and foolish. I mean, as Dan has stated, the very idea of wish-fulfilment, in the terms we understand it, is quite a modern idea. Not to get all philosophy of language about it but when you read historical texts – especially those written in other languages – we have accept a degree of distance between those texts and ideas of selfhood, self-expression and society that are so embedded in our thinking we take them for granted.

The thing is, as far as I’m concerned you can interpret texts however you like, and if you want to look at these a collection of complex historical texts in a reductive and tedious way ... well ... feel free.

In short: what Ruderetum said :)

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Dan H

at 15:13 on 2011-07-14

-- I really don't see a fundamental (as opposed to flavor) difference here. Eg., in what way is "Amadis of Gaul" fundamentally different from the books we're talking about?

I haven't actually read Amadis of Gaul (were I feeling glib, I might suggest that I see no evidence that you have either) so I can't comment on the content but I can certainly comment on the context.

Amadis of Gaul, Wikipedia informs me, is an Iberian Knight-errantry tale of uncertain authorship and has its origins in the traditions of chivalric romance. It is not actually a novel *at all*.

The Wise Man's fear, by contrast is a work of twenty-first century genre fiction. It was written by a single author, and published for the mass market and targeted at a clearly defined demographic whose preferences and habits its publishers will have invested both time and money in researching.

They are fundamentally different *sorts* of text and people read them for fundamentally different reasons.

I'd also point out that I see no reason for the burden of proof to be on me to demonstrate that Amadis of Gaul *is* different to the Wise Man's Fear when you have made no effort to demonstrate that it *isn't*.

That said the other important difference between Amadis and Kvothe is this.

Yes, both Amadis and Kvothe are highly skilled at what they do, but the crucial difference is how the two characters are supposed to relate to their *target audience*.

Amadis the Gaul was a chivalric romance. Its target audience would have been very broad, since it was almost certainly based on an existing popular narrative, and while there may be a narrow section of people who heard or read the story who really were, or really aspired to be, knights, the vast marjority would not have been, and would not have ever thought they could be (the fourteenth century was not, after all, known for its vast social mobility). He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.

Kvothe, by contrast, has a variety of qualities which his target audience (teenage geeks) are *extremley* likely to possess, and which grant him amazing abilities with little or no effort on his part. For example:

* He is extremely clever and this makes him excellent at schoolwork

* He is particularly skilled at technical subjects

* His supernatural powers come largely from understanding concrete technical laws (many of which are specifically derived from real-world physics and engineering)

* He is awkward around women

* He has had a very small amount of martial arts training

* He was picked on as a child but came into his own at university

All of these are qualities which the book's target audience are *extremely likely* to identify with *specifically*. You don't look at Kvothe and admire him for his cleverness, you look at him and you recognise in him your *own* cleverness, all of his skills parallel skills which geeks have in the *real world*. He's not somebody to look up to, he's *you*. Even his flaws are really virtues (his awkwardness with women, for example, actually makes him *more* attractive to the opposite sex).

That's the difference between a mythic or an inspirational story and wish fulfilment. A mythic hero embodies virtues to which you aspire, but which you know that you do not truly possess. A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.

It is, in fact, an important and fundamental difference.

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Steve Stirling at 18:01 on 2011-07-15

A wish-fulfillment character has all of the same qualities you already have, but they work the way you *want* them to work instead of the way they really work. So your creepy inability to speak to women is transformed into an endearing shyness, your six months of kendo really does make you brilliant at fighting, and your nerdboy hobbies are the secret to saving the universe.

-- well, you have a point there.

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Steve Stirling at 18:05 on 2011-07-15

He may have had individual virtues which individual readers might have recognised in themselves, but I see no evidence at all that he was supposed to be a stand-in for the reader.

-- well, no, but that's not quite the point of wish-fulfillment. You don't think you're Superman, you -wish- you're Superman, and for the duration of the story you -imagine- you're Superman, able to do these amazing things.

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Dan H

at 10:27 on 2011-07-19On Superman: The really, really important thing about Superman is Clark Kent. Superman works as wish-fulfilment because Superman actually *isn't* Superman most of the time, he's this mild-mannered nebbishy guy with glasses (again, much like the intended target audience).

And of course the other thing to remember is that wish-fulfilment isn't a binary - as Orion and others have pointed out above, a lot of stories have wish-fulfilment *elements*, whereas Kvothe comes across to me as *pure* wish-fulfilment.

(Sorry I know Steve's been banned, but I thought this discussion might have been getting somewhere)

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Orion

at 06:18 on 2011-07-20Dan,

I never really read/watched Superman, but I'm interested by your comment, because it doesn't really match up with my experience of other secret identity setups. As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.

I always assumed that the primary function of Clark Kent was as a narrative device. Superheroes generally and Superman in particular are just too effective when on stage in costume, so you have to give them human lives and duties to stretch out the plot and prevent them from solving everything immediately. Secondarily, I would imagine that Clark kent would actually pull the story toward the "redemption" end of my "redemption/wish fulfillment" spectrum by making the protagonist suffer.

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Dan H

at 12:13 on 2011-07-20

As a child, anyway, I never demanded that my protagonists have a "normal" life for me to identify with them; I had no trouble projecting myself onto the superhuman character directly.

I don't think I made my point clearly enough. It's not the fact that Superman has a secret identity that's the issue, it's the fact that despite his superpowers (and superpowers are really a red herring here) Superman is basically an ordinary guy with parents and a hometown and a job. (It is, I believe, often said in DC comics fandom that the difference between Batman and Superman is that Superman is really Clark Kent, whereas Bruce Wayne is really Batman).

Without Clark Kent, Superman would basically be Dr Manhattan, and while you can certainly imagine that it would be *cool* to be the Big Blue Guy, you aren't really invited to imagine that he *is* you, which I would argue is a necessary part of wish-fulfilment.

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Orion

at 15:40 on 2011-07-20That makes a lot of sense. In the general case, we could say that wish-fulfillment only works when the character basically thinks like the reader, so that they tend to do with their opportunities the kinds of things the reader would want to imagine doing.

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http://sprizouse.blogspot.com/

at 07:37 on 2011-08-21There was a

long comment thread

running over at Crooked Timber and I ended up bringing up this critique. Anyway, the post was about NPR's list of Top 100 Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels and I thought you should take a look at both the CT post (and comments thread) and the NPR list. Your input would probably be appreciated.

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http://sunnyskywalker.livejournal.com/

at 01:49 on 2011-09-01I had some fun running the Wikipedia entries for both books through Regender.com.

http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Name_of_the_Wind

http://regender.com/swap/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wise_Man%27s_Fear

Unfortunately it doesn't seem to handle compound words well, so it didn't manage to rename the series

The Queenkiller Chronicles

, but otherwise... very interesting!

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/EcqJaTxyotMBIWa7wHjFXrVfJz29#49b9a

at 02:24 on 2012-06-15

Is there any sign or hint that Kvothe is ever going to fail at something in a manner which he can't recover from within a hundred pages or so?

You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?

Yes, there is a sign. Perhaps you could call it a hint. Or perhaps the biggest unanswered question in the entire story.

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Shim

at 08:13 on 2012-06-15

You mean, aside from the fact that his sympathy no longer works, he's lost his ability to fight, he no longer plays music at all.......?

I haven't read the book, but those sound like pretty general, narrative losses rather than actual failures, if you see what I mean.

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James D

at 18:01 on 2012-06-15

I haven't read the book, but this dialog is waayyyyy too over-narrated for my tastes. I was rather surprised, given the author apparently has a sterling reputation. Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone. Do we really have to be told he's exploding when the next words out of his mouth are "how the hell am I supposed to know?" That whole scene just seems to fall into the same "more is more" trap a lot of modern fantasy authors are in. More description, more worldbuilding, more detail, less left up to the imagination, less engagement of the reader in the storytelling process.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 05:23 on 2012-06-16It doesn't help that the narrator sounds like a complete tool.

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valse de la lune

at 08:34 on 2012-06-17His voice a roll of thunder, no less. This is the brilliant writing all the fanboys praised?

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Dan H

at 14:29 on 2012-06-17

Seriously, there is more description of the characters' expressions than actual dialog there, and a lot of the expressions would be evident from the dialog alone.

There does seem to be a peculiar bit of received wisdom amongst a certain type of reader (and therefore a certain type of writer) that "just" dialogue isn't proper writing. I'm largely making this up, but I think it's born out of a prejudice against things which seem "simple" or possibly a desire to seem intellectual. It might also be a misplaced reaction against books which fail by trying to emulate films (or conversely, it may be that it appeals specifically to an audience accustomed to visual media, who expect every line of dialogue to be accompanied by some visual cue). It might also (I really am just guessing here) overlap with that nonsensical "use all the senses" advice you get in mediocre writing guides.

I don't like to be too smug about this sort of thing, but I do sometimes feel that a lot of Rothfuss' reputation for great writing stems from his adopting a style which overlaps with his audience's preconceptions about what good writing ought to look like. It's the kind of writing which makes you feel clever, and I suspect that his audience are particularly fond of feeling clever. Of course *criticizing* this sort of writing also makes you feel clever, so the audience kind of wins either way on this one.

I actually don't think Rothfuss' writing is that bad - The Wise Man's Fear wasn't hard to read because it was badly written, it was hard to read because it was nearly a thousand fucking pages and nothing fucking happens in it.

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Michal

at 18:20 on 2012-06-17Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.

From what I've read of

The Name of the Wind

(which admittedly isn't that much) I also didn't quite understand the praise Rothfuss's prose; I mean, there were some nice passages but there's quite a lot of space between them filled with not-so-great stuff. It's better than Paolini or Brooks or Goodkind but that's setting the bar really fucking low. I didn't quit reading because of the prose. I quit because I found Kvothe insufferable.

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Arthur B

at 18:29 on 2012-06-17

Hmm, I'm not sure if it's fair to base your opinion of whether it's well-written or not on a single passage, since just about every book has its awkward bits. I agree that what's there isn't all that impressive and painfully overwritten, but I think the situation described would've made me throw the book against the wall, not the writing-style.

This. There's a world of stuff to howl at in that extract before you even begin to consider the prose.

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James D

at 20:05 on 2012-06-17

As a reader, I tend to value a writer's style pretty highly, and given that his style is so often praised, I was just rather surprised at how overwrought the snippets you quoted were. If they're not representative of the whole book, well, you should've picked better ones!

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography? Couldn't he just be making it up to make himself look good? It's just too absurd for me to believe that Rothfuss expected people to take it seriously. Not to say that simply using an unreliable narrator is an instant ticket to literary quality, but maybe the problem isn't so much that the stories are filled unbelievable self-aggrandizement, but that Rothfuss failed at making Kvothe egotistical and charming, so he ended up insufferable instead. I imagine the book might be pretty fun if it were clear that Kvothe was just a loser who made up absurdly flattering, highly improbable stories about himself. And if it were maybe 300 pages long.

Just as an aside, The Wise Man's Fear recently won the David Gemmell Legend Award for Best Fantasy Novel of 2011.

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Arthur B

at 20:41 on 2012-06-17

I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary. Smarmy bullshit is smarmy bullshit, regardless of whether you're intended to believe it or not.

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Michal

at 20:52 on 2012-06-17

isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?

Well,

The Name of the Wind

certainly wasn't, since the frame story made it clear Kvothe really was just that awesome. Any cracks in the narrative this time around, Dan?

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 21:25 on 2012-06-17

I dunno about other people here, but my usual response to egotistical tossers bragging about their unlikely sexual exploits is to disengage from the conversation ASAP, by whatever means necessary.

Yeah, I don't really see what other response there is. The kind of wish-fulfillment this book seems intended to provide seems like it would be better delivered through, say, a video game. Hearing some douchebag talk about fucking hot chicks doesn't quite make me feel like I'm in his place.

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James D

at 21:32 on 2012-06-17Maybe I am being too generous then. I'm just trying really hard to understand what people see in the books beyond typical fantasy wish-fulfillment+adventure, but maybe that's all it is, minus the benefit of a tight plot books in that style need.

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Dan H

at 23:21 on 2012-06-17

They're fairly representative (although Felurian speaks in a *particularly* flowery way) - it's just that I don't think the writing is particularly *bad*, just not especially *good*. Or perhaps to put it another way, what flaws there are in the writing are just a specific instance of the far more general problem of the book being smug, up itself, and nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is. I might also suggest that amongst fantasy readers "well written" is code for "overwritten" four times out of five.

Honestly I'm not sure there's anything tremendously wrong with the plot of the sex goddess bit though - isn't the book presented as basically an egotistical liar's autobiography?

Very much not. It's the autobiography of somebody *extremely self-deprecating*. As evidenced by the awful bits where Kvothe point blank refuses to narrate all of the bits where he actually does interesting stuff. Framing-story Kvothe is a broken man, and he is extremely reluctant to acknowledge his own triumphs - Bast actually has to explicitly instruct the Chronicler to encourage him to focus on them, because Kvothe's own sense of guilt over the Terrible Things That Happen In Book Three is such that he no longer trusts himself.

Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.

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James D

at 00:04 on 2012-06-18

Effectively it's *exactly the opposite* of the Baron Munchausen story - Kvothe isn't a fantasist or a teller of tall tales, he's a genuine hero who is uncomfortable with his own heroism.

Yech. Why the fuck do so many people like this book again?

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 02:03 on 2012-06-18Because nothing tops off a douche sandwich like a nice juicy glob of emo.

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http://omarsakr.wordpress.com/

at 08:23 on 2012-08-22Hey Dan,

I've recently stumbled across a few of your articles and I'm currently experiencing the giddy highs of a high-school girl's crush, or what I imagine that would feel like anyway. Still, I'll refrain from allowing that to develop further just yet because a) it's creepy as balls and b) the interwebs are full of disappointing traps and a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier (no matter how many times I write that or look it, it just seems wrong).

Anyway, I just wanted to comment to say thank you! I've felt like, for the longest time, I've been alone in my dismissal of Rothfuss and my dismay at the critical acclaim he's received. Don't get me wrong, he seems like a great guy and he's a passable writer, but he in no way deserves the absurd praise that's been heaped on him. I remember writing an article years ago about how overrated he and GRRM are as authors today (although the latter is certainly more deserving). So, it's been great to read your articles (albeit belatedly) and the comments that so accurately carve these books up.

In WMF you correctly pointed out a passage that utterly ruined the book for me. I was willing to overlook a lot of what you pointed out, due to its light entertainment factor, until I read the 'I was on my way to X when this and this and this happened to me but I don't have time to tell you about any of those exciting things because the story must go on'. What thoroughly pissed me off about the ensuing billion-page section was that NOTHING HAPPENED. There's a stupidly long section where Kyvothe and his band are sitting around the woods telling each other stories just so Rothfuss could indulge in meta-wankery, his constant wink-wink nudge-nude can you see that I'm telling a story about a guy telling a story about how he and some other guys told stories once and the way stories within stories are blah blah blah.

That section of the book filled me with rage. Goddamn.

Okay, just had to get that off my chest. He writes easy, simple prose that's really engaging and this could have been a much better series but for all the reasons you pointed out, he, the series itself, and his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang. Serious fantasy my ass.

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Arthur B

at 10:03 on 2012-08-22

a few well written articles that espouse similar ideas and opinions to my own doesn't preclude you from being say, I don't know, a rabid Tea Partier

If it's any reassurance, Dan's preferred coffee for about as long as I've known him.

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http://fishinginthemud.livejournal.com/

at 17:07 on 2012-08-23

his fans need to get over themselves and be a little less pretentious about the whole shebang

Well, the rabid Nice Guy geek contingent has tried every other personality flaw, so it's about time they tried pretentious literary snobbery.

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http://everstar3.livejournal.com/

at 03:17 on 2013-06-12I realize I am quite late to this discussion, but I write now to thank you for saving my Kindle, because if I'd read that speech of Felurian's on it, I most likely would have thrown it across the room.

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Robinson L

at 10:36 on 2013-07-19Found this via a friend of mine, who's a major fan of the books:

looks like the Kingkiller Chronicles is being adapted into a TV series

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Dan H

at 22:47 on 2013-07-19What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

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Arthur B

at 22:54 on 2013-07-19

What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

Because brick-sized open-ended novels with silly numbers of characters and no end in sight make for great soap operas?

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Melanie

at 06:37 on 2013-07-20

What is it with people making TV shows of interminable fantasy series that the authors have shown no signs of actually being able to finish?

The more books the author writes

without

finishing it, the more the tv show can be dragged out?

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Jules V.O.

at 13:30 on 2013-07-20There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.

In that vein, I suspect the best part of the KC show would be the 'storm, piracy, treachery, and shipwreck' segment, where the lack of specificity would give them the freedom to fill in some conventional(ly satisfying) content.

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Arthur B

at 14:01 on 2013-07-20

There's a bit in the last Twilight movie where things go completely off-the-rails awesome because the director decided to be all sarcastic and show the threatened climactic showdown action scene, before revealing it to be a dream or something; 'you could have been watching a story where things happen,' is the none-too-subtle subtext. It is by far the best part of the entire series, and includes more decapitations than the entirety of Master of the Flying Guillotine.

I do love the fact that the

Breaking Dawn

director was like "Fuck it, I'm just going to do exactly what the text says rather than presenting whatever it is people think they see in the text", so lo and behold

an adult werewolf falls in love with a baby.

#Ferretbrain #The Kingkiller Chronicle #Patrick Rothfuss #Twilight #Dan H

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