Queen of the Darkness
Jul. 7th, 2005 12:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethFinished book
Queen of the Darkness
by Anne Bishop
series annoys me in many many ways
but part I shall speak on here is: When you've spent three books setting up a woman as a healer, able to heal body, mind and spirit, then having the ultimate solution be to use her like a selective nuke seems very much a waste.
By the end of this series she's killed outright 40% of people and 'broken' 30%. Because their Blood was 'tainted'. On account of the society had been twisted until it was full of abusers who used rape and torture to control each other. Okay, so they're very bad people. But the book actually did a good job of showing how some of them got that way, how it ends up being an understandable response to their environment. And then it kills them anyway. Some very quickly when MarySue go Boom, some really slowly and messily.
Thing is, it is easy to have sympathy for a victim that stays a victim. Poor little victim. All small and hurt.
It is much harder to have sympathy for a victim who responds by becoming an abuser.
So there are these grand vengeance fantasies, wipe out all the abusers, give them all the pain they've dished out. Only it already showed how they dished out pain just like they had already been through. So how does that help?
And there are a couple of characters who have been through the worst, acted like total bastards, but come out of it alive. Because they aren't 'tainted'. However many women they tortured to death, it was only the bad women, and never a child. That seems to be the dividing line in the ethics of the series, they aren't bad really because they didn't hurt children. Oddly I consider torture and murder of grown women to be an actual bad thing too. So why isn't that torturer killed? Aside from the children thing, apparently it is All Okay because He Loves Her.
Major huge problems with that.
Especially since that seems to be the justification back when the Her in question was 12 and there was spirit-sex (almost). That part remains creepy.
Torture and mass destruction of abusers is still torture and mass destruction. Those are bad things to do. It isn't the appropriate response.
If someone is doing bad things to people it is because that someone is twisted up inside. They need untwisting, not blowing to bits. And if you're inventing an omnipotent healer anyway, of course it is possible. Is a story, all things can happen.
But instead of answering with compassion this story answers with vengeance and expects the reader to be all 'yaaay' about it.
By the end of the book poor omnipotent MarySue has blowed herself up as well as all the bad people. And this to me seems appropriate. Because she might have blowed up all the people she decided were 'tainted', but that won't stop the same behaviour from emerging again. People do dumb stuff until they are taught better. Blowing some of them up just teaches the survivors to blow you up better first. Its a dumb ending.
Queen of the Darkness
by Anne Bishop
series annoys me in many many ways
but part I shall speak on here is: When you've spent three books setting up a woman as a healer, able to heal body, mind and spirit, then having the ultimate solution be to use her like a selective nuke seems very much a waste.
By the end of this series she's killed outright 40% of people and 'broken' 30%. Because their Blood was 'tainted'. On account of the society had been twisted until it was full of abusers who used rape and torture to control each other. Okay, so they're very bad people. But the book actually did a good job of showing how some of them got that way, how it ends up being an understandable response to their environment. And then it kills them anyway. Some very quickly when MarySue go Boom, some really slowly and messily.
Thing is, it is easy to have sympathy for a victim that stays a victim. Poor little victim. All small and hurt.
It is much harder to have sympathy for a victim who responds by becoming an abuser.
So there are these grand vengeance fantasies, wipe out all the abusers, give them all the pain they've dished out. Only it already showed how they dished out pain just like they had already been through. So how does that help?
And there are a couple of characters who have been through the worst, acted like total bastards, but come out of it alive. Because they aren't 'tainted'. However many women they tortured to death, it was only the bad women, and never a child. That seems to be the dividing line in the ethics of the series, they aren't bad really because they didn't hurt children. Oddly I consider torture and murder of grown women to be an actual bad thing too. So why isn't that torturer killed? Aside from the children thing, apparently it is All Okay because He Loves Her.
Major huge problems with that.
Especially since that seems to be the justification back when the Her in question was 12 and there was spirit-sex (almost). That part remains creepy.
Torture and mass destruction of abusers is still torture and mass destruction. Those are bad things to do. It isn't the appropriate response.
If someone is doing bad things to people it is because that someone is twisted up inside. They need untwisting, not blowing to bits. And if you're inventing an omnipotent healer anyway, of course it is possible. Is a story, all things can happen.
But instead of answering with compassion this story answers with vengeance and expects the reader to be all 'yaaay' about it.
By the end of the book poor omnipotent MarySue has blowed herself up as well as all the bad people. And this to me seems appropriate. Because she might have blowed up all the people she decided were 'tainted', but that won't stop the same behaviour from emerging again. People do dumb stuff until they are taught better. Blowing some of them up just teaches the survivors to blow you up better first. Its a dumb ending.