![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI finished the book that was winding me up due to lack of events actually changing characters. The whole journey was external and didn't lead to growth or development, just stuff happening. Which, okay, a lot of people are probably fine with, but which seems to me to be all meat with no vegetables.
According to the last paragraph the book is about 'the prince who didn't want to be king'. Which, okay, good start for growth. But since he had in fact been kinging on increasing scales since the beginning, not quite what I was looking for.
If you're setting him up to grow and change, what exactly is it about being king that he doesn't want?
What specific incidents show-not-tell how he's turning away from the role?
And what incidents on the road to power show him growing into it?
So to start with we're shown his brother is an abusive, violent, cruel, creep, who hits the servants and sexually assaults women. He also hits his family, though not as yet his father the king. And the king flat out won't believe he does anything bad.
The king is a bit of a cypher. He dies at the start. Because bad eldest brother kills him a lot. Like, he doesn't just stab him once and get on with kinging, he stabs stabs stabs him and seems quite a lot upset with the man. He isn't given any reasons, he's just this isolated bad man.
So, the good brother has been trying to protect his sister and mother but can't because older brother is bigger, stronger, more violent, more powerful in court, and their father thinks the sun shines out of him so he won't believe the injuries are anything to do with him. Yet good brother isn't dreaming on power for himself? He's shown reacting to all this by looking forward to the day he can move out. Not even move out and bring his relatives with him. Not even worrying about how he'll move out but still be subject to his abusive brother. Just, move out. That's the 'not wanting to be king' bit, he wants to live somewhere else and... well, live somewhere else.
So okay, say he wants out and isn't thinking about getting anyone else out with him. He responds to the early crisis of his father's murder by running. He might want to get over the border and away, leaving it all behind. That's his dream, writ slightly larger. But that means that his journey through his own kingdom needs to be constantly interrupted by reminders of how much they need him and how much they'll suffer if he leaves.
The book might just barely have been doing that, kind of sort of, but it didn't tie it back to either his father the ineffectual or his brother's violence. The direct witness of his brother's policies was another character entirely. Doesn't actually work quite right, then.
Also if his desire is to run away then his challenge needs to be a point where he can choose to either leave forever, keep running, live the rest of his life far away while leaving his brother to it... or turn and fight.
We didn't get that moment.
What other ways are there to reject kingship?
His brother is abusive. He uses his power to manipulate others, bend them to his will, and doesn't care about consequences to them, or believe any consequence will hit him. If that's the good brother's model of kingship, using power to keep others down, then he's really rejecting becoming an abuser.
In that case his journey needs to be about the correct and supportive use of power. Why do we need kings? ... actually medieval fantasy as a whole needs to answer that one, and with answers rather better than 'prophecy' or 'watery tarts threw swords'. But, why do we need a good boss, when we're working to counter a bad boss? He's not just going to be an absence. He won't sit on a throne just not-abusing his power. Even not-using his power is a problem if we're going with the whole heroic fantasy genre. So how can he use the varying aspects of a king's power to become a force for good? And what in his own personality needs to shift before he can bring himself to do it?
The most obvious is attitudes to violence. The whole 'thank you, I can kill again!' bit gets tired, but there's a lot of it going around. Bad brother uses violence to get sex and gold and people that fear him which he mistakes for respect, good brother uses violence to... well, not get dead, in general. Stop the rapists. Fight evil beasties instead of other humans, because where's teh fun in fantasy without inventing evil monsters you can kill without conscience? :eyeroll:
Anyway, if that's supposed to be the hero journey, again, he doesn't change. He fights his brother early on, he fights to defend his followers, he's got the heroic attitude to violence. He's not very good at it yet, not big, strong, best with a weapon, and that's what the story sets out to solve. But again, levelling up is not character growth. The character wants the same thing at the start and end of the story, that is, to stick a sharp thing in his brother so his problems go away. And in 600 pages he's no closer to doing it. So, not much by way of growth.
Attitudes to giving orders though... his brother uses lies and manipulates people into bowing to his role, his crown, rather than his moral authority or general being anywhere in the region of right. Perhaps the good brother learns from this that persuasion is mean bad wrong, mostly lies, and telling people what to think is a manifestation of evil. Only then how do you combat the bad propaganda campaign? You need to get your own stories up and running instead. And you need to have alternative orders, to organise people and get them pointed in a direction that won't starve the kingdom by next season.
The big thing then is that he grew up with nobody listening to him. He has learned, over and over, that if you tell the truth about your abuser you get blamed for shit stirring and shunned. In order to get his kingdom back and turn them around to his way of thinking, he has to start believing persuasion is even possible, if all you've got is the truth.
Except, actually, the setup isn't right for that. It was only ever his father who didn't listen. He has loyal sidekicks from the start. They even witness the same things he does, so it's never in question that these events are real. He never has to get people to listen to that suppressed truth and persuade them his abuser is an arse, because the story sets that up to have happened already from the start.
No growth, no change.
It's much more interesting if you take the same elements, abused kid who was never listened to and just wants to get away from it all, and send him off to run away from his kingdom. Because why should he care, when nobody ever cared about him? And then you have him bump into problems and solutions, victims and people who care about them, and learn that compassion sometimes is actually helpful and a real thing and so on. He learns to care about his kingdom as they learn to care about him. He learns to talk persuasively, or possibly at all. It's easy to give up on talking when it don't work. He starts finding ways that do work. And he finds he was not alone, never was, never will be. There's always people who see true and don't hate.
Better story that way.
And that way he'll get to the coast or the border or whatever, have the whole bright future ahead of him, and turn around and make a speech and instead find he's got a whole lot of allies right here and he'll stick around to take care of them.
But it's not just kingship that he's growing into, it's magic. This being a magic fantasy book. So there's layers of story that are about magic. Except we don't see him learning to control magic, we see him learn he already learned it and forgot about it, which is a story choice I just plain don't grok. What was that even for? Why?
Okay, so, maybe it's about believing in himself, and believing he can get things done, despite earlier failures to protect his mother, sister, father. So say he's learned all this magic stuff, but never learned it's truly powerful. It hasn't been something he could use against his brother, so what kind of use is it? So his journey would be about learning the usefulness, and then he can turn around and aim it at his bro. His specific sort of magic is about contacting the dead, so there's plenty of mileage to make it about stuff like diplomacy and repairing relationships and getting past grief. It kind of managed that. Just he hasn't applied any of that to his own life by the end of the first book, he's just holding pattern grieving and scared and guilty.
Maybe he could have a different problem with applying the power, since his lessons were some of the only untroubled memories of family he has. Something special from his grandmother to him. Possibly he doesn't want to get the current bad world all tangled up with the happy memories. Then the lesson would be how having that place to stand in your own head and heart actually makes it easier to deal with all the challenges, it can't mess up that there was family that loved you once.
Or possibly, instead of mystery repressed memory lessons, he had a whole vivid dream life of being taught lessons by dead people. Contacting spirits being his bag. His daytime life could be dreary badness of his bully brother bashing him around, his dream life would be all learning how to do magic and channel his inner strengths. This at least would explain how his second full time intensive study course wasn't noticed by anyone. He just did it in those 8 hours a night nobody pays much attention to.
So then the thing is a believe in yourself mess. Which, in a household that tells you over and over you've been the problem, is not so simples to do. There's dodgy ways to do this, because being the person that can hear dead people is usually not a good sign, but there's other ways that are more about ... not following your dreams so much as building them. He's been raised as the spare, the unwanted carbon copy of an heir he despises. Learning how to be himself, use his own knowledge, follow his own pattern, is a path to realising his own power and leadership potential. Build his own dreams.
Or there's angles I like less. Like, what if the problem is mostly feeling guilty and feeling like he should have done more and controlled more of the situation. There were incidents that seemed to be about teaching others not to feel guilty when people die cause they did their best. In that case... I don't see how it leads to kingship, really. But there's a lot of other stuff about trust in a higher power. Not my bag even when religion is.
Most of these angles, the abuse being ignored by the king and needing to notice people who are in danger right then, would be angles for introducing more women. Because much as I hate the presence of sexual violence in a story, it would give the women a very different view of the bad brother to his men. He's all about presenting himself well to the soldiers in barracks, so that's a great reason to make the good brother's allies be drawn from other segments of society. And then the swordswoman from another kingdom brings the martial skills to complete the set.
... that isn't what happens.
The protagonist doesn't seem to learn much from his companions except in a level-up sense. Like, their personalities could all have been different and he'd have got the exact same lessons off them. Waste of layers.
If you've got a spare noble running around refusing to noble because he doesn't feel any sense of duty to his people from never having met them before (a plausible setup that I don't think I could read into this book), then you have him meet every layer of society and see how they work together. If he thinks teh nobility is rotten then time for a worker's revolution, obviously. ... the presence of the noble white male to catalyse this is a time honored trope that I hate rather a lot, but, it would at least do something with him.
If he's going to kick over the system or if he's going to restore status quo ante he, and the reader, needs to know what that system was like.
And along the way he can learn values like hard work, self sacrifice, teamwork.
Maybe he's no good at controlling his magic because he never applied himself, or because he didn't value precision and the work requires it, or because he thinks words are enough and it really needs actions. (Wands set to pumpkin, learn that wishing isn't enough.)
He can learn all sorts from other layers of society and their ways of working.
... one thing that I found very frustrating by the end of the book was how everyone was nobles by then. You think for a while they'll be nice solid hardworking people who don't happen to be noble, but no, all the ingenuity and courage are somehow associated with particular bloodlines.
Winds me right up.
I remain convinced that medieval fantasy with mages can still be democratic and not prop up the idea of the divine right of kings. Fireballs and people just being born better are not inherently or necessarily connected. There's such things as libraries and studying and years of hard work.
A king who starts off fully convinced he's the chosen of the goddess and learns, through a long tour of his kingdom and several hundred pages, that he was actually a bit of a useless wanker, but can in fact learn better by patient application of skill and noticing other people know almost all things better than he does... doesn't that sound more interesting than a king who starts out thinking he's chosen and, oh look, what a surprise, really is!
I mean, having one guy at the center of the book who turns out to be good at everything means you've wasted a lot of words by having all those other people around. One guy at the centre of the book who is quite a lot useless but can bring together disparate people in a cause... well, then you've got yourself a leader.
I realise these long grumbles about what other people aren't writing are somewhat ridiculous given that I myself am not even writing, but, it's really frustrating sometimes when I can see the much better book just underneath the travelogue. People can travel around and do things, but they can also become, and I'm much more interested in that.
According to the last paragraph the book is about 'the prince who didn't want to be king'. Which, okay, good start for growth. But since he had in fact been kinging on increasing scales since the beginning, not quite what I was looking for.
If you're setting him up to grow and change, what exactly is it about being king that he doesn't want?
What specific incidents show-not-tell how he's turning away from the role?
And what incidents on the road to power show him growing into it?
So to start with we're shown his brother is an abusive, violent, cruel, creep, who hits the servants and sexually assaults women. He also hits his family, though not as yet his father the king. And the king flat out won't believe he does anything bad.
The king is a bit of a cypher. He dies at the start. Because bad eldest brother kills him a lot. Like, he doesn't just stab him once and get on with kinging, he stabs stabs stabs him and seems quite a lot upset with the man. He isn't given any reasons, he's just this isolated bad man.
So, the good brother has been trying to protect his sister and mother but can't because older brother is bigger, stronger, more violent, more powerful in court, and their father thinks the sun shines out of him so he won't believe the injuries are anything to do with him. Yet good brother isn't dreaming on power for himself? He's shown reacting to all this by looking forward to the day he can move out. Not even move out and bring his relatives with him. Not even worrying about how he'll move out but still be subject to his abusive brother. Just, move out. That's the 'not wanting to be king' bit, he wants to live somewhere else and... well, live somewhere else.
So okay, say he wants out and isn't thinking about getting anyone else out with him. He responds to the early crisis of his father's murder by running. He might want to get over the border and away, leaving it all behind. That's his dream, writ slightly larger. But that means that his journey through his own kingdom needs to be constantly interrupted by reminders of how much they need him and how much they'll suffer if he leaves.
The book might just barely have been doing that, kind of sort of, but it didn't tie it back to either his father the ineffectual or his brother's violence. The direct witness of his brother's policies was another character entirely. Doesn't actually work quite right, then.
Also if his desire is to run away then his challenge needs to be a point where he can choose to either leave forever, keep running, live the rest of his life far away while leaving his brother to it... or turn and fight.
We didn't get that moment.
What other ways are there to reject kingship?
His brother is abusive. He uses his power to manipulate others, bend them to his will, and doesn't care about consequences to them, or believe any consequence will hit him. If that's the good brother's model of kingship, using power to keep others down, then he's really rejecting becoming an abuser.
In that case his journey needs to be about the correct and supportive use of power. Why do we need kings? ... actually medieval fantasy as a whole needs to answer that one, and with answers rather better than 'prophecy' or 'watery tarts threw swords'. But, why do we need a good boss, when we're working to counter a bad boss? He's not just going to be an absence. He won't sit on a throne just not-abusing his power. Even not-using his power is a problem if we're going with the whole heroic fantasy genre. So how can he use the varying aspects of a king's power to become a force for good? And what in his own personality needs to shift before he can bring himself to do it?
The most obvious is attitudes to violence. The whole 'thank you, I can kill again!' bit gets tired, but there's a lot of it going around. Bad brother uses violence to get sex and gold and people that fear him which he mistakes for respect, good brother uses violence to... well, not get dead, in general. Stop the rapists. Fight evil beasties instead of other humans, because where's teh fun in fantasy without inventing evil monsters you can kill without conscience? :eyeroll:
Anyway, if that's supposed to be the hero journey, again, he doesn't change. He fights his brother early on, he fights to defend his followers, he's got the heroic attitude to violence. He's not very good at it yet, not big, strong, best with a weapon, and that's what the story sets out to solve. But again, levelling up is not character growth. The character wants the same thing at the start and end of the story, that is, to stick a sharp thing in his brother so his problems go away. And in 600 pages he's no closer to doing it. So, not much by way of growth.
Attitudes to giving orders though... his brother uses lies and manipulates people into bowing to his role, his crown, rather than his moral authority or general being anywhere in the region of right. Perhaps the good brother learns from this that persuasion is mean bad wrong, mostly lies, and telling people what to think is a manifestation of evil. Only then how do you combat the bad propaganda campaign? You need to get your own stories up and running instead. And you need to have alternative orders, to organise people and get them pointed in a direction that won't starve the kingdom by next season.
The big thing then is that he grew up with nobody listening to him. He has learned, over and over, that if you tell the truth about your abuser you get blamed for shit stirring and shunned. In order to get his kingdom back and turn them around to his way of thinking, he has to start believing persuasion is even possible, if all you've got is the truth.
Except, actually, the setup isn't right for that. It was only ever his father who didn't listen. He has loyal sidekicks from the start. They even witness the same things he does, so it's never in question that these events are real. He never has to get people to listen to that suppressed truth and persuade them his abuser is an arse, because the story sets that up to have happened already from the start.
No growth, no change.
It's much more interesting if you take the same elements, abused kid who was never listened to and just wants to get away from it all, and send him off to run away from his kingdom. Because why should he care, when nobody ever cared about him? And then you have him bump into problems and solutions, victims and people who care about them, and learn that compassion sometimes is actually helpful and a real thing and so on. He learns to care about his kingdom as they learn to care about him. He learns to talk persuasively, or possibly at all. It's easy to give up on talking when it don't work. He starts finding ways that do work. And he finds he was not alone, never was, never will be. There's always people who see true and don't hate.
Better story that way.
And that way he'll get to the coast or the border or whatever, have the whole bright future ahead of him, and turn around and make a speech and instead find he's got a whole lot of allies right here and he'll stick around to take care of them.
But it's not just kingship that he's growing into, it's magic. This being a magic fantasy book. So there's layers of story that are about magic. Except we don't see him learning to control magic, we see him learn he already learned it and forgot about it, which is a story choice I just plain don't grok. What was that even for? Why?
Okay, so, maybe it's about believing in himself, and believing he can get things done, despite earlier failures to protect his mother, sister, father. So say he's learned all this magic stuff, but never learned it's truly powerful. It hasn't been something he could use against his brother, so what kind of use is it? So his journey would be about learning the usefulness, and then he can turn around and aim it at his bro. His specific sort of magic is about contacting the dead, so there's plenty of mileage to make it about stuff like diplomacy and repairing relationships and getting past grief. It kind of managed that. Just he hasn't applied any of that to his own life by the end of the first book, he's just holding pattern grieving and scared and guilty.
Maybe he could have a different problem with applying the power, since his lessons were some of the only untroubled memories of family he has. Something special from his grandmother to him. Possibly he doesn't want to get the current bad world all tangled up with the happy memories. Then the lesson would be how having that place to stand in your own head and heart actually makes it easier to deal with all the challenges, it can't mess up that there was family that loved you once.
Or possibly, instead of mystery repressed memory lessons, he had a whole vivid dream life of being taught lessons by dead people. Contacting spirits being his bag. His daytime life could be dreary badness of his bully brother bashing him around, his dream life would be all learning how to do magic and channel his inner strengths. This at least would explain how his second full time intensive study course wasn't noticed by anyone. He just did it in those 8 hours a night nobody pays much attention to.
So then the thing is a believe in yourself mess. Which, in a household that tells you over and over you've been the problem, is not so simples to do. There's dodgy ways to do this, because being the person that can hear dead people is usually not a good sign, but there's other ways that are more about ... not following your dreams so much as building them. He's been raised as the spare, the unwanted carbon copy of an heir he despises. Learning how to be himself, use his own knowledge, follow his own pattern, is a path to realising his own power and leadership potential. Build his own dreams.
Or there's angles I like less. Like, what if the problem is mostly feeling guilty and feeling like he should have done more and controlled more of the situation. There were incidents that seemed to be about teaching others not to feel guilty when people die cause they did their best. In that case... I don't see how it leads to kingship, really. But there's a lot of other stuff about trust in a higher power. Not my bag even when religion is.
Most of these angles, the abuse being ignored by the king and needing to notice people who are in danger right then, would be angles for introducing more women. Because much as I hate the presence of sexual violence in a story, it would give the women a very different view of the bad brother to his men. He's all about presenting himself well to the soldiers in barracks, so that's a great reason to make the good brother's allies be drawn from other segments of society. And then the swordswoman from another kingdom brings the martial skills to complete the set.
... that isn't what happens.
The protagonist doesn't seem to learn much from his companions except in a level-up sense. Like, their personalities could all have been different and he'd have got the exact same lessons off them. Waste of layers.
If you've got a spare noble running around refusing to noble because he doesn't feel any sense of duty to his people from never having met them before (a plausible setup that I don't think I could read into this book), then you have him meet every layer of society and see how they work together. If he thinks teh nobility is rotten then time for a worker's revolution, obviously. ... the presence of the noble white male to catalyse this is a time honored trope that I hate rather a lot, but, it would at least do something with him.
If he's going to kick over the system or if he's going to restore status quo ante he, and the reader, needs to know what that system was like.
And along the way he can learn values like hard work, self sacrifice, teamwork.
Maybe he's no good at controlling his magic because he never applied himself, or because he didn't value precision and the work requires it, or because he thinks words are enough and it really needs actions. (Wands set to pumpkin, learn that wishing isn't enough.)
He can learn all sorts from other layers of society and their ways of working.
... one thing that I found very frustrating by the end of the book was how everyone was nobles by then. You think for a while they'll be nice solid hardworking people who don't happen to be noble, but no, all the ingenuity and courage are somehow associated with particular bloodlines.
Winds me right up.
I remain convinced that medieval fantasy with mages can still be democratic and not prop up the idea of the divine right of kings. Fireballs and people just being born better are not inherently or necessarily connected. There's such things as libraries and studying and years of hard work.
A king who starts off fully convinced he's the chosen of the goddess and learns, through a long tour of his kingdom and several hundred pages, that he was actually a bit of a useless wanker, but can in fact learn better by patient application of skill and noticing other people know almost all things better than he does... doesn't that sound more interesting than a king who starts out thinking he's chosen and, oh look, what a surprise, really is!
I mean, having one guy at the center of the book who turns out to be good at everything means you've wasted a lot of words by having all those other people around. One guy at the centre of the book who is quite a lot useless but can bring together disparate people in a cause... well, then you've got yourself a leader.
I realise these long grumbles about what other people aren't writing are somewhat ridiculous given that I myself am not even writing, but, it's really frustrating sometimes when I can see the much better book just underneath the travelogue. People can travel around and do things, but they can also become, and I'm much more interested in that.