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I really liked Morveer. The way his background gets darker and darker. Probably foolish of me but until the completely idiotic betrayal he and his apprentice were some of my favorite characters. Seriously duder, you go to all this trouble to train an apprentice, someone to carry on your legacy, then you gently caress it all up. I don't know, it just seems like even if you are a master poisoner you should trust someone sometime at some point. Just be like "I'm teaching you all this, and I will never poison you." Or something, because it seems really dumb to go to all the trouble of training someone you don't trust even a little bit.
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Aug 15, 2010 22:38
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Well until the "god" dude in the south makes more. Really though the Eaters make sense in the setting. It's basically a showdown between the two remaining powers winner take all. Ordinary people are supposed to be pawns. They aren't aware of that ideally, but they don't matter. Whichever one of the powers wins will just remake the world in their image anyway. Hopefully Monza and the kingdom that gets created as a result will be enough to tip the balance back in humanity's favor. With any luck Eaters won't be viewpoint characters anymore though. Because it is boring to read about people being killed in the blink of an eye.
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Oct 8, 2011 12:21
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Awesome that they put Logen on the cover. Maybe he'll run into demongirl from the trilogy.
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Apr 14, 2012 15:18
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They'll probably be more like arquebuses. So folks with swords still have a chance to mess your day up, as long as you miss that first time. Lets Abercrombie have cowboys and claymores which is pretty much the best way to do fantasy. The problem with Bayaz is he doesn't seem to have any ideas about what he wants civilization to look like. The Union is a completely re-active empire, the Gurkish are the people doing new and exciting things with science. Sure that changes in The Heroes awesome cannons! but it doesn't change the fact that the Union is stagnant.
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May 22, 2012 11:00
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The most amazing part is how comically inept Bayaz is. I mean sure you wouldn't tell him that to his face, what with the organs of your body being turned into scorpions or whatnot, but he is just so clearly ill-equipped to do anything. (Besides be an immortal prick.) Glokta would do a better job being an immortal puppet master. FFS Logen would do a better job being an immortal puppet master. (I hope in the next book he's just completely casual about heights. Uses cliffs as shortcuts, jumps off houses onto horses, that kind of thing. The climactic scene is him grabbing the antagonist and just straight walking off a huge drop with a grim grin on his face.)
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Jun 4, 2012 11:37
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As a counterpoint/proof of that belief (depending on taste) China Mieville's civilizations tend to be pretty unique. The city that gambles everything including laws, High Cromlech which is basically an undead aristocracy, (people save up to get liched, everybody pities the vampires) Tesh which is basically run by divinely inspired madness (they go to war with New Crobuzon because of a nightmare) and Armada. Armada is the closest, with parallels to Tortuga and the Barbary states. The trick is to mash up different times and different cultures. The warring city states of Italy become way more interesting if the Vikings are next door and have just unified. Victorian era England could actually be interesting if you replace France with Persia and Germany with China under the emperors that kind of thing. People have done pretty much every thing you can do (barring the introduction of new tech) at one time or another so the thing to do is see what happens when you juxtapose.
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Jun 5, 2012 10:53
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No it isn't. It's made clear through others reaction to him in the novels themselves that an immortal rear end in a top hat running roughshod over them is the last thing they want. Bayaz' refusal to go back to the mud due to his overwhelming hubris is the last thing any of the characters expect or know how to deal with. He is literally a pointy hat stamping on their faces forever. Your earlier statement about people preferring dictators to chaos is laughably incorrect. Why do you think the dictators keep getting overthrown and nations keep descending into chaos? It isn't because chaos is the natural order of things, it's because the rulers lose the mandate of heaven or whatever other metaphor people use to describe exactly how much poo poo they will put up with before they'll murder the gently caress out of every rear end in a top hat in charge. Read an actual book on the rise and fall of nations, please. The only thing that makes living in a dictatorship bearable is the sure and certain knowledge that even the God-King is mortal. That's why Bayaz doesn't rule openly, that's why he sets up systems of oppression such as the banks, and that's why the ultimate ending of the series will be his victory over the Gurkish followed by his defeat at the hands of peasants. He's made himself obvious too to many people to be the power in the shadows for much longer. Peztopiary fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 14, 2012 |
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Jun 14, 2012 09:06
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I actually liked this better than Heroes. It is a western though, in that it wants you to understand that the people you are meeting all have reasons for making this trip out to the far frontier. I didn't really feel like anyone who had a vignette devoted to them didn't deserve it. The whole point of Shy's constant references to blood in her past was to give people a good contrast with Logen. Dude's a psycho, and Abercrombie wants people to remember that. It's a little heavy handed, but given people's tendency to ignore villainy when it's presented sympathetically maybe it needs to be. Dab Sweet's little arc was actually unexpected. That's why Leef had to die. Killing someone who didn't have potential to develop into a real and interesting character wouldn't have worked so well on the reader. Plus it fits into Abercrombie's whole 'things just happen' schtick. Gonna miss Cosca though. Easily the best villainous mercenary in literature.
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Nov 26, 2012 14:01
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All the people Abercrombie writes about are objectively bad (or they get murdered before we get access to their no doubt horrific internal monologue.) which is kind of the point? Bayaz is obviously the worst however. Also 'a perspective from which lives look like ants' dude, the whole point of morality is that when you suddenly achieve Godlike power you don't change your perspective. If you do, you weren't really moral in the first place you were just powerless. It isn't just that the setting is deformed (it isn't shaped, shaped implies care and thought) by his mere existence, it's that he is aware of that deformation and revels in it. It isn't that black and white morality requires us to identify characters as evil, it's that we never once see Bayaz offer kindness or any other positive emotion to anyone.
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May 31, 2013 10:53
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I think being one of the few immortals would tend to do that to you. At some point your empathy and humanity is going to be snuffed out by time. Bayaz is terrible, but an economic system that isn't founded on slavery and cannibalism is clearly better for the majority.
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Feb 25, 2014 20:16
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Nah Calder is in every way suited to be a ruler while Jezzail isn't. Making deals, betraying allies, playing politics is Calder's meat and bread. He isn't perfect at it or anything, look at him and Dow, but he's actually been brought up in that life. Jezzail just isn't at all equipped to end up where he ended up. What makes you think Calder is going to come to a poor end? Certainly nothing in the books suggests it. He's gotten rid of his major enemies, he's consolidating his power, and he knows exactly how dangerous Bayaz is so he's unlikely to gently caress that situation up. At what point do we stop using spoiler tags? I'll admit I feel like 80+ pages is enough but I don't want to spoil things for new folks. In the Bad Threads we gave up on them really quickly, but that was because we hated everyone and everything.
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Oct 16, 2014 17:59
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Locke Lamorra books are someone's D&D campaign world on paper. They're no better and no worse than the Malazan stuff, but that is what they're most similar to. I enjoyed them, but they're nothing like Abercrombie.
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Dec 18, 2014 23:06
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They wouldn't work without the trilogy though. None of his Circle of the World books are actually self-contained. You don't have to read all of them, but if you haven't read the trilogy parts of BSC and Heroes don't make sense. The only reason that whole scene with Bayaz and the corpse pit works as well as it does is because of how well established Bayaz has been by the trilogy.
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Jan 26, 2015 02:26
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Barbe Rouge posted:I had a feeling it was. Are the "ancient elves" the pre-apoc humans then? And magic is the technology that survived? None of the survivors remember the names of the old cities so it was a long while in the past, the rules for the radiation are pretty fantastic/more magical realism than real, and the one time we see a character use a gun she has *very* strange beliefs about how it works. That doesn't mean Abercrombie didn't just change how radiation works. It does seem to be post apocalyptic, but you wouldn't get the confusion that the characters have about the past over a few hundred years. Maybe they wouldn't remember the names of major cities, but an oral tradition wouldn't have mutated as fast as the traditions seem to. The confusion going on with the One God coming up from the South for instance, that to me indicates that it's pretty long time since anyone has been able to read a Bible. On the other hand, we've seen no evidence that the Elves aren't human.
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Feb 16, 2015 03:21
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ZombieLenin posted:...Scott Lynch is another contemporary "fantasy" author who uses it. Nah. There is no indication that the elves aren't actually ya know elves in the Gentleman Bastards series.
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Feb 20, 2015 13:34
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It would have been a really boring way to end that particular character's arc. Who gets a boring death like that? I can't really think of anyone.
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Jun 10, 2015 21:54
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It felt right, even Yarvi makes mistakes. Really, the witch not seeing through the assassins was a bigger surprise to me.
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Jul 30, 2015 09:20
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02-6611-0142-1 posted:Did Yarvi kill Skifr's family? Was that intentionally ambiguous? Absolutely, yes. Like Mother Wexler said, what possible reason did she have to re-involve Skifr? Also, she didn't know where Skifr was going at the end of book two and Yarvi did. It's really the same theme running through all his books, nobody with power is remotely trustworthy.
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Aug 13, 2015 20:33
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Intentionally ambiguous. What possible reason do we have to give him the benefit of the doubt?
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Aug 13, 2015 20:36
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It'll come out April 1st and be all about how Bayaz is justified.
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Aug 25, 2015 07:06
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I liked the second one better than the first, but that's only because it felt more like Ffarhd and the Gray Mouser than someone's adventuring group.
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Oct 15, 2015 14:34
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I felt like the post apocalypse books using dumb post apocalypse signifiers was okay. It was YA for sure, but they weren't billed as anything else. Kind of annoyed that he had Yarvi kill the witch woman's family to get her back. It makes sense and all, but it was pretty obvious from the moment she said that her family had been killed that Mother Waxwood(?) hadn't had anything to do with it.
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Jan 28, 2016 00:42
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Never look for illustrations of things you like from books. Way better to let the theatre of the mind thing happen than to rely on someone else's imagination.
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Feb 12, 2016 07:55
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:there are exceptions to this, like jaime knocking over the cup is best seen live on youtube yes. as a wild card i'm forced to agree that anything is better than letting the Mountain that Doesn't Write into your head.
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Feb 12, 2016 22:11
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She's got her own issues (though less than Logen) and the best part about the character is the reminder that you don't have to be a broken piece of poo poo it's a choice. Her mere existence reinforces how terrible all the people you just named are and how completely monstrous Bayaz is. Which is necessary because people keep forgetting. They're not heroes, they're protagonists. She's a hero.
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Jun 4, 2016 12:38
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I feel like an in-character reminder that you don't have to be a monster is fine. It's possible that Abercrombie is just at a place where he wants to write that kind of character, he's been doing anti-heroes pretty much his entire career. Javre being awesome doesn't make Whirrun or Logen less cool. It does highlight that most of the people in the setting are choosing to be assholes.
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Jun 4, 2016 17:20
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