InsaneJournal

Eddings again - are you tired yet?
Aki's post. I'm trying to post all of the Eddings discussion entries today, so I can move on to the next topic (quest-fantasy) tomorrow.



I'm a few chapters away from the end of THC, but since I skipped ahead and read the interesting bits already I'm more or less done.

I can't figure out if I'm annoyed by Eddings's habit of writing himself into a corner and then yanking himself out with a jar in consistency, or if I just feel sorry for him. I can definitely understand how it happens--he sends the book off to the publisher and starts work on the next, and along the way realizes that he needs (or maybe just wants) something to be different, and it's too late to change the thing everyone knows about. Case in point: Aphrael (and the other Younger Gods of Styricum) and the Elene church. In E, Dolmant asks Sephrenia which heathen god she worships, and she tells him it's a goddess and she's not allowed to tell him which, and he's all surprised at the notion that a deity can be female. In T--THC, I'm almost certain--Patriarch Bergsten comes up with a plan to get messages to Aphrael even though all the Pandions who could do magic properly were gone, by contacting one of the other younger gods. He tells what's-his-name--the interim preceptor of the Pandions--that the Pandions worship Aphrael ("Not worship, your grace!" "We know all about Aphrael, and have for hundreds of years!") and then explains which other order prays to which god. And, for crying out loud, even knows that Aphrael and Setras are particularly close. What did they do, get Sephrenia really drunk and pry answers out of her while she was in no condition to remember answering the next day? Oh, and the miraculous attractiveness of Beril is another such case, in this case much more likely a want instead of a need - "I want him to be pretty, so he is! Even though there's no prior evidence to suggest this!" And the Pandions apparently not being worldly, at least not where Beril is concerned. Because it's so much funnier for him to be clueless, and it creates so much suspense while the reader is waiting to find out whether he'll give in or not!!

Ah, but support in canon is such fun. (Also, you are a terrible, terrible influence on me. Just so you know.) I was reading THC yesterday afternoon and going, "I am seriously seeing Khalad/Beril here." and trying to figure out how in the world Eddings's characters run around slashing themselves, since it seems logically impossible. On the one hand, they're Generic Fantasy Characters who don't go any farther than the tips of their noses. We get no backstory (f'r instance, why is Bevier so devout? did Ulath and Tynian first meet in TDT, or did they know each other earlier; and, if they already knew each other, how?, and if they didn't, how'd they get to be good friends so quickly? and so on.) beyond what's vitally, vitally necessary for the plot (Sparhawk and Kalten were friends when they were children; Sephrenia is old). They don't do things because they want to, they do things because the plot tells them to. Therefore, it's almost impossible to imagine them having enough personalities to actually slash themselves without Eddings being aware of it. On the other hand, this is Eddings we're talking about. Nobody has ever explained the concept of "Show, don't tell" to him. Whenever he sits down and goes, "These characters are in Twu Luv with each other!," the narrative immediately informs you of such, no matter what leaps of illogic it has to take to get there (Sparhawk being really intuitive? What?). So it's next thing to impossible to imagine them doing so with his knowledge. Of course, all this really means is that I've been corrupted into seeing romantic relationships where there really aren't any, but it's an interesting logical puzzle: If A, B, and C are all true, and A cannot be true if either B or C is true...

The Delphae could have had a lot more done with them, as could the Rendors; I agree completely. My problem with Eddings-style plotting is actually related to that. You build a world around the concept of a shiny blue MacGuffin and a quest to destroy an evil god. Then you gather your characters, trail them through every country on the map, and have them kill the evil god and save civilization/the world. Then you want to write a sequel. Well, you've just gone and killed a god. Almost anything would be anticlimax. So you raise the stakes to teetering, Tower-of-Babel like heights and introduce the red Evil Opposite of the shiny blue MacGuffin, and you send your characters off to the other side of the world and trail them through every country on that map, and finally they use the blue thing to banish the red thing and save the universe (although in E/T it was just the world again. I suppose all the carnage made up for that?). And then there is nothing else you can do with that world. If you try to write another sequel, you can't, since there's nowhere to go that isn't anticlimax. You can write a prequel, if you want, but the kind of worldbuilding you've done means that everything's connected to the shiny blue MacGuffin, so your prequel's just going to be "and then this happened, and then this happened, and incidentally we're moving closer and closer to the real plot!" (That said, I actually really liked the prequels to B/M, since they didn't involve chasing the shiny blue MacGuffin and there were glimmers of actual worldbuilding there.) The real world doesn't work like that, though.

Rendor definitely could have been so much more than it was, though. We did see that they have some really good doctors--it was Rendor Sparhawk went to in E to find out what had happened to Ehlana and what to do to cure her--but other than that, it was so flat. Eddings never even thought to explain why women wear the veils and so forth, and yet do things like lie around in the nude on rooftops to absorb the moonlight (y helo thar, logical inconsistency!). I think in the actual Muslim world it's so they don't tempt men to sin with their appearance, or something like that, and it's somehow connected to a belief that women don't have proper souls, or something (I'm not awake yet. My memory isn't working the way it should be), but Eddings's Muslims Rendors just do it because they can, or something, and apart from thinking that the organized church is evil are just like regular Elenes theologically, as far as we know. (Also, the whole organized-church-is-EVIL thing is apparently something that both the Rendors and the Daresian Elenes agree on, but I can't recall ever learning quite what the church did. It would have been cool to know, yes?)

With regards to Eddings failing at geography...heh. The weird thing is that he actually seemed to get it in the B/M--there was an equator, on the south side of which the seasons flipped. Maps had both tops and bottoms; the map at the beginning of B/M was just the top half of the map of the western continent, and in M we saw the giant southern part of Cthol Murgos; Mallorea had an equator from the very first time it appeared. My initial impression of Rendor was that it was the same kind of thing as Cthol Murgos, with a bottom part we didn't see, and then maybe other, irrelevant countries below it. However, Daresia kind of squished that illusion, since half the world wasn't taking up the amount of space it should. (Also, he goes through mapmakers rather quickly.)

And I've just run out of time--my parents are ordering me to shut down the computer and get in the car to go off for a week's trip where there may or may not be internet. Further discussion of the last bit of the E/T will be forthcoming when next I see you.

Also, what are we going to talk about when we're done with Eddings? I think we have so much to say because he's mediocre--we're pointing out things that he did badly, as well as things he did just well enough to make us really wish he'd done them better. (And it's something like watching a protracted trainwreck, rereading Eddings--the man was my introduction to serious fantasy (although I don't know if the term applies; "non-young-adult fantasy" might work better), and it hurts to realize that he's not as brilliant as I thought he was: one, because I'm really grateful he got me started writing fantasy, and two, because it'd be nice to have been introduced to the genre by a genius.)