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Quinton posted:I don't entirely agree with the reviewer's complaint that the Masquerade is "too evil"... This was my single biggest problem with the book. Since I knew the author was a goon and I might get to post at him about the book, I jotted down notes as I read the book so that I'd remember certain things. I've got 4 pages of handwritten thoughts and impressions of the book and probably 3 pages worth of them are a variation of "The Masquerade is a gigantic sack of used assholes and I have no idea why people put up with them". The Masquerade punch every 'evil' button on the Modern Western Society panel. Imperialist homophobic eugenicsts. Concepts like "reperatory childbirth" where they breed women like livestock as a punishment. Neighbors informing on each other's 'social sins'. They are so overtly mustache-twirling evil that I found it distracting, honestly. I kept getting kicked out of the story to ask myself 'Why do people put up with this poo poo?' I'm gonna spoiler-tag it from here on out just in case. I look at it this way. Your evil empire needs one of two things to stay in power, really. It either needs the kind of iron fist that lets it tell potential rebels to go gently caress themselves, or it needs to provide enough benefit for people to tolerate it in spite of the fact that it's the evil empire. The Masquerade spent the first half of the book not showing either of those things. Dentists and doctors got mentioned a couple of times, but that was it as far as that went, and the Masquerade's iron fist didn't get any airtime until the Navy used their Greek fire to chase those first pirates away from the tax convoy. I really think the book would have benefitted from showing me Falcrest or somewhere else where the Masquerade had a softer touch, something that gave me reason to think "Okay, this isn't that bad, I would take this over feudal warfare or road bandits or dying of cholera". Or I think it would have benefited from showing their iron fist earlier in the book, so that I could see how they managed to maintain an empire while being mustache-twirling evil. Either would have done a lot to help my immersion in the second quadrant of the book.
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Oct 12, 2015 06:37
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Silver2195 posted:Only about halfway through the book, but I found it interesting that people said that the Masquerade was "too evil" when for the first few chapters its evilness struck me as restrained by fantasy standards i.e., it forcibly remakes other cultures instead of outright massacring or enslaving them. It later turns out that the long-term goal probably is enslaving everybody in the world, but that's not obvious to the average person in universe. The description of the Cold Cellars did seem a bit over the top, though; that kind of direct social control seems a bit out of place in a region where the Masquerade otherwise seemed to have left previous social systems in place. It's more than the Masquerade seems to have a checklist of "Evil poo poo To Do" that it cribbed from modern western society and it's ripping right down the whole list. Eugenics, check. Homophobia? Check. Genital mutilation? Check. Big Brother-style spying and thoughtcrime type stuff? Check. Rigid gender roles? Check. Women are breeding livestock? Check. Diseases as weapons? Check. 'Reperatory Childbirth' as a punishment for infidelity? Got that too. No evil too petty, no deed too over the top. If you told me that they gave each schoolchild a puppy so that they could end each semester by strangling the puppies of the bottom 10%, I'd believe it. I think the book would be stronger if the Masquerade was a bit less overt with the mustache twirling evil and a bit more overt with the benefits of its society. Medicine. Dentists. Sewage and Saniation. Trade routes. Piracy suppression. That kind of thing. Some kind of benefit that would make people more likely to bear their chains peacefully. As it is, that stuff gets like two lines of dialogue in amongst the "tribadism and the knife" talk. Khizan fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Oct 13, 2015 |
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Oct 13, 2015 07:36
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