I started writing a reply then accidentally navigated away and lost it--
Ugh, I hate when that happens! DW is pretty good about saving in progress comments, but then that one time it doesn't, it's usually a really long comment I didn't have saved anywhere else. GAH!
But Miles is nothing if not fallible, and it's really important to the books--I mean, you can't have the end of Memory without the beginning of Memory.
Yes! And, like, the first time we see Miles as a protagonist, in the opening of Warrior's Appretice, he fails (for very understandable reasons) and then essentially continues to fail in increasingly audacious ways until he transmutes that into success, LOL. That's the thing I like about Miles, not the dashing Admiral Naismith persona, but the view of all the people who can see underneath it.
and/or him becoming more likeable over time
I'm thinking this has got to be a big part of it, because I could see myself liking Lymond better in the sequels now that I know he is fallible and also the things and people he genuinely cares about underneath the glib, quote-spouting exterior.
I had totally forgotten about the prosecutor, and I didn't think of shipping them, but I kind of love it XD
Haha, you are welcome for the Lymond crackship XD
I think one of the reasons I don't like the Penric stories as much as her other writing is in part because he does strike me as less fallible than Miles, and/or at least, his fallibility tends to have much lighter consequences.)
Oh, interesting! I do like the Penric stories, but I also agree with you that Penric himself is less fallible as a protagonist than Miles (or Aral, or Ista, or even Cazaril). Pondering that, my hook into the Penric stories is, initially, Desdemona, who is much more fallible, and after a few novellas we get to my actual favorite character in this strand, Adelis, who is certainly very fallible (I can't remember if you've read enough Penric to get to him).
Not to be all TV Tropes but a lot of works seem to suffer very heavily from a protagonist-centred morality, and/or--and this is one thing that always drives me nuts--a failure to treat the world and the characters seriously, on their own terms, instead of essentially a morality fable which must map directly to contemporary, real-world political dialogue.
Oh god, yes, I hate all of these things, and the way they've become so common in modern stories -- I think maybe stories that have come out of fannish sensibilities? Like, yes, this is a big problem I have with Gailey in basically everything of theirs I've read (as I noted on the Echo Wife write-up). I have not read the Natash Pulley Mars sci-fi, and it makes me sad to hear the science is so shoddy, because I enjoyed the Watchmaker books a fair bit while being angry about some of the protagonist-centric morality there too (only they're written skillfully enough that I was never totally sure whether this was just the narrator's close POV or if I the reader were meant to agree with him), but then she wrote a book set in 20th century Russia that my Russian friend could not finish because it was badly researched and the tropes kind of in poor taste given the historical context, and now this...
Not everything has to be a directly applicable commentary to the contemporary politics!!
The worst is when contemporary politics are pasted on and don't flow naturally from the world the author has created. I had many, many complaints about Children of Blood and Bone (I am still so mad that book won a bunch of awards), but that was definitely one of them.
I've been thinking lately about the way a lot of modern SFF seems to take nobility for granted as kind of set dressing in a way which somehow allows the world to be very progressive, which drives me bananas because That's Not How That Works-
yeah, and that feels very fanficcy to me... This was not SF, but I feel coming from and popular in the same online spaces that a lot of modern SFF does/is -- Red, White and Royal Blue drove me nuts for that reason.
(Links to rants about RWaRB and CoBaB available upon request, though possibly you've seen them already, haha.)
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Ugh, I hate when that happens! DW is pretty good about saving in progress comments, but then that one time it doesn't, it's usually a really long comment I didn't have saved anywhere else. GAH!
But Miles is nothing if not fallible, and it's really important to the books--I mean, you can't have the end of Memory without the beginning of Memory.
Yes! And, like, the first time we see Miles as a protagonist, in the opening of Warrior's Appretice, he fails (for very understandable reasons) and then essentially continues to fail in increasingly audacious ways until he transmutes that into success, LOL. That's the thing I like about Miles, not the dashing Admiral Naismith persona, but the view of all the people who can see underneath it.
and/or him becoming more likeable over time
I'm thinking this has got to be a big part of it, because I could see myself liking Lymond better in the sequels now that I know he is fallible and also the things and people he genuinely cares about underneath the glib, quote-spouting exterior.
I had totally forgotten about the prosecutor, and I didn't think of shipping them, but I kind of love it XD
Haha, you are welcome for the Lymond crackship XD
I think one of the reasons I don't like the Penric stories as much as her other writing is in part because he does strike me as less fallible than Miles, and/or at least, his fallibility tends to have much lighter consequences.)
Oh, interesting! I do like the Penric stories, but I also agree with you that Penric himself is less fallible as a protagonist than Miles (or Aral, or Ista, or even Cazaril). Pondering that, my hook into the Penric stories is, initially, Desdemona, who is much more fallible, and after a few novellas we get to my actual favorite character in this strand, Adelis, who is certainly very fallible (I can't remember if you've read enough Penric to get to him).
Not to be all TV Tropes but a lot of works seem to suffer very heavily from a protagonist-centred morality, and/or--and this is one thing that always drives me nuts--a failure to treat the world and the characters seriously, on their own terms, instead of essentially a morality fable which must map directly to contemporary, real-world political dialogue.
Oh god, yes, I hate all of these things, and the way they've become so common in modern stories -- I think maybe stories that have come out of fannish sensibilities? Like, yes, this is a big problem I have with Gailey in basically everything of theirs I've read (as I noted on the Echo Wife write-up). I have not read the Natash Pulley Mars sci-fi, and it makes me sad to hear the science is so shoddy, because I enjoyed the Watchmaker books a fair bit while being angry about some of the protagonist-centric morality there too (only they're written skillfully enough that I was never totally sure whether this was just the narrator's close POV or if I the reader were meant to agree with him), but then she wrote a book set in 20th century Russia that my Russian friend could not finish because it was badly researched and the tropes kind of in poor taste given the historical context, and now this...
Not everything has to be a directly applicable commentary to the contemporary politics!!
The worst is when contemporary politics are pasted on and don't flow naturally from the world the author has created. I had many, many complaints about Children of Blood and Bone (I am still so mad that book won a bunch of awards), but that was definitely one of them.
I've been thinking lately about the way a lot of modern SFF seems to take nobility for granted as kind of set dressing in a way which somehow allows the world to be very progressive, which drives me bananas because That's Not How That Works-
yeah, and that feels very fanficcy to me... This was not SF, but I feel coming from and popular in the same online spaces that a lot of modern SFF does/is -- Red, White and Royal Blue drove me nuts for that reason.
(Links to rants about RWaRB and CoBaB available upon request, though possibly you've seen them already, haha.)
Very much the same to yours!!
thank you! <33