InsaneJournal

So how does one "Edd" an "ing", then?
Collection post.

Aki's:


I shared your genuflection-scoffing with my dad, who's sitting right here, and he said that the schism that split the Roman Catholic Church from the Eastern Orthodox Churches had to do with a conjunction in the Nicene Creed, which is nearly as silly as genuflection on the surface except apparently the particular conjunction raised questions about the status of the Trinity or something. So maybe the genuflection is merely the visible symbol of... ...no, no. I really don't know why I bother, except out of some tiny residual semblance of loyalty.

Mm, good point about the B/M. I always kind of wondered if that was just Eddings trying to excuse his plot, singular, anyway.

...I hate to disappoint you, but this is about all I have. I didn't start the Tamuli, I have no idea why, and so... :\


My post:

Church schisms can be so silly, can't they? At least the Roman Catholic/Eastern Orthodox split derives from debating the status of the Trinity - and while something like that could certainly be the cause for the split in E/T as well, we're not told, and so the genuflection seems silly. If Eddings had even made a vague reference to something more complicated, I would've swallowed it with no trouble at all.

And you don't disappoint me - if you haven't started Tamuli yet, then you haven't - it's no big deal, and I'm patient.

Aki's post:


I got about halfway through DoF today, and I have come to the following conclusions:
1. Eddings only knows one way to describe the city of Cimmura, and
2. everything was doomed to repeat itself in B/M for purposes of authorial convenience.
3. Ehlana does not get less annoying with time.
4. the series - just like B/M, and The Redemption of Althalus - was written by someone who thinks like a Hollywood casting director.
5. nobody has free will, or lives outside of the plot.
6. if Eddings had to write a series without gods, he would be unable to do so.
as well as some more or less random miscellany.

The beginning of DoF was remarkably like the beginning of TDT: Sparhawk and Faran, in the rain and the mist, late at night, coming into Cimmura; an encounter with the gate-guard, and Sparhawk revealing an important status and then giving said guard a coin; an encounter with a lady of negotiable virtue, to whom he gives more money than he did to the guard(s); a watcher who is not friendly to Sparhawk; a subsequent encounter with his squire (who acts like the exact same person in each, what.). Large chunks of text were actually lifted from one to the other, and it annoyed me. Greatly. (Also, Eddings seems to haul out the description of Rendor and the women going to the wells in the predawn light whenever he (Eddings, not Sparhawk) gets bored, have you noticed?)

This leads me to the conclusion that the repetition in B/M was mere convenience. Eddings went, "Hm, I want to save effort! Let me make everything repeat, unless it's something that I don't want to repeat or that needs to change in order for me to get to my generic medieval society!" He's doing the same thing in the Tamuli with regards to the Elenium (and, er, to the Belgariad/Malloreon - perhaps we should spend a day or two comparing the two series when I'm done rereading Tamuli?), but this time - I think - without justifying it. Unless he did that while I had zoned out from mindless repetition wasn't looking.

Ehlana. Ah, Ehlana. Where shall I start? She's annoying. Everyone acts like she's brilliant, but she's really, really not. And she might be beautiful, but that's not an excuse. (And she couldn't not be beautiful, because every single female in Eddings who isn't evil - and even lots of the ones who are - or senile is beautiful. See next paragraph.) She thinks she can control everyone, and then she has tantrums when she can't, and everyone goes, "Oh, but she's the queen! And beautiful!" Grr.

Everyone in Eddings is beautiful or handsome, unless they're evil and male, and then they're allowed to be ugly. Even a lot of the evil females - the ones running around in the nude, at least - are absolutely stunning to look at. (Except Zandramas, after she started turning into a galaxy. Which was actually kind of cool.) The protagonists are always attractive; even if it's not outright stated, there are enough persons of the opposite gender running after them that it can be assumed. The only exception is Sparhawk (which is rather refreshing). Well, monarchs - kings, to be precise - and random nobles are allowed to be plain or ugly too, I suppose. But still.
Also, on a closely related note, nobody ever attempts to sing and has a lousy voice, or even a decent voice. Anyone who decides to share their vocal talents with the world has them in great abundance. I actually like reading the descriptions of the singing voices, but.. every single human female on the Malloreon quest, for instance, has a beautiful voice, despite the fact that none of them are professional singers (although Polgara might be cheating with sorcery, Velvet's a spy and Ce'Nedra's a queen; neither occupation requires a good singing voice). And they sing together in such marvelous harmony when they wish! And then, in the Tamuli, there's that impromptu concert on the hillside where, once again, a statistically improbable percentage of the population proves to have utterly fantastic voices. And there will probably be more such instances.

I get a newsletter from the author Holly Lisle about writing in general, and she's currently giving an eight-part advice lecture on writing a novel with depth. I'm not supposed to quote without copying the newsletter in full, but I can and will paraphrase. The fifth installment - which I just got today - talked about subthemes, and she more or less said that if you only have a main theme, you can put as much into each character and the world as you want, but it will come out flat. I immediately thought of Eddings. There is attention paid to the worlds and the plot and the characters. In its own way, it's very impressive. But, to Eddings, his worlds and characters stop at the edges of the plot, and so he doesn't care about the rest, and so we end up having these discussions and you end up writing mental fanfic.

He also uses The Original Purpose Of The Universe in the B/M, and Aphrael in the E/T, way too much as crutches. He wants something to happen? Voilà! It happens! It's improbable? There was superhuman meddling involved! Really! (And in the E/T: Characters are being inconveniently in-character? Aphrael can fix it and turn them into fluffy pink things lobotomy victims happy people!)

There's also a lot of telling, which bothers me a bit. He can't let the reader draw her own conclusions; the narrative has to explain everything. Or he can't be bothered to show something like Melidere's secret campaign to trap Stragen (which I for one wanted to see, although he probably would have messed it up), so he has Sparhawk - with Aphrael's "don't you have eyes?" as a motivator - see that, in fact, such a thing is happening.

Also - this really belonged with the Elenium discussion, but... - have you noticed the remarkable similarity between the deaths and post-deaths of Kurik and Toth of the B/M?