Emma Bull, War for the Oaks

[oyceter]

I haven't read this in years. My very first thought was something like, wow she spends a lot of time describing everyone's clothes! And: Wow, this was written in the eighties, wasn't it?

I still absolutely adore the phouka. I think he fits in with the Fool/Trickster type character that I like so much.

That said, a lot of it read like a first novel -- the sort of Mary-Sue-ish specialness about Eddi, her amazing skill with music and her ability to change the minds of the Seelie Court and the Lady while gaining magical powers of her own (sort of) remind me a great deal of the discussion in oracne's LJ a while back about the visitor to foreign culture gaining some sort of nifty martial art prowess.

I wonder if I would have noticed this if I had reread more frequently? Hrm.

Comments

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

I have to say, though, how common is it to have the protagonist of a fantasy novel not be special in some way, to not, if exposed to a new culture, gain some prowess in something, and not to eventually save the day?

I think that's common enough that you need to take it a lot farther to qualify as a Mary Sue. Possessing extraordinary beauty in addition to extraordinary skills, having all the characters fall in love with or platonically adore you, having even your enemies respect you, and being utterly without flaw is what signals Mary Sue to me.

Eddi doesn't strike me as more of a Mary Sue than, say, any of Emma's other protagonists. Nikki Falcon is royalty, has a remarkable and unusual background even apart from that, has extraordinary skills, and saves the day; Sparrow has a remarkable and unusual background, possesses extraordinary... I'll call them qualities, as "skills" doesn't quite fit, and saves the day; Susan has an eidetic memory and is extremely good in a crisis, and James has extraordinary talents (though they don't exactly save the day).

Steven Brust, China Mieville, George R. R. Martin, Iain Banks, Charles de Lint, Lois McMaster Bujold, and everyone else I see when I glance at my shelves tends to feature protagonists who are special in some way, acquire special skills during the book, and/or save the day.

The only sf writer I can think of offhand whose characters do not possess extraordinary skills, do not acquire prowess in anything during the course of the book, and do not save the day is Maureen McHugh. And possibly Richard in Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE.

Sf and fantasy is so much a literature of the exceptional and heroic and world-shaking protagonist to begin with that Eddi doesn't strike me as going farther in that direction than most books in the genre do.

[oyceter]

Maybe Mary Sue isn't quite the right term. And I don't know exactly why it struck me as that this time around -- I think I was thinking along the veins of the Robin McKinley heroines (particularly Beauty in Beauty), or the so-called "princess" dream that Gaiman names in A Game of You... little girls dream of being swept away from their ordinary roots and turn out to be the stolen daughter of royalty or something.

Although I think Eddi fits more in with the typical fantasy protagonist, like all the young guys (Shannar, Jordan, etc.) who are living their backwater lives and find they have Destiny or something.

Anyhow, I suppose one could argue that while Eddi doesn't possess extraordinary beauty, she does manage to beguile about half of the Seelie Court, have sex with the sexy Willy Silver, earn the respect of the Lady and the Queen of Air and Darkness, earn Hedge and the brownie's trust, etc. I don't know what it is that makes me think of it as more "special" than the special protagonists running around everywhere in fantasy. Maybe it's that she doesn't seem to accumulate much psychological damage along the way? Or that she seems much the same in the end as the beginning? Not sure...

[dherblay.livejournal.com]

Steven Brust, China Mieville, George R. R. Martin, Iain Banks, Charles de Lint, Lois McMaster Bujold, and everyone else I see when I glance at my shelves tends to feature protagonists who are special in some way, acquire special skills during the book, and/or save the day.

The only sf writer I can think of offhand whose characters do not possess extraordinary skills, do not acquire prowess in anything during the course of the book, and do not save the day is Maureen McHugh. And possibly Richard in Neil Gaiman's NEVERWHERE.

I wonder how much of this is a generational thing -- I don't think I've read a novel by anyone on the list above -- but I can think of a host of science fiction authors whose characters neither possess exceptional skills nor save the day. The protagonists of Philip K. Dick and Robert Sheckley tend to be average Joes caught up in circumstances they can't take control of. John Sladek's characters are pretty much normal, everday people, except that they're robots. Even Heinlein's characters (other than Valentine Michael Smith, of course) aren't so much possessed of extraordinary skills as they are more willing or better prepared to express their normal capabilities to the fullest. Even Alfred Bester's psychics and Dick's precognitives are normalized in futures where their special powers have become not-so-special in societies that have adapted to them.

The fantasy novels from the seventies and the eighties I've read, on the other hand, were all about the child who possessed secret powers and was marked out for great things. This is ironic, as those Del Rey paperbacks were uniformly derivative of Tolkien, who instead extols the potential contained within the ordinary.

This is not to say that science fiction ever did not contain exceptionally powerful characters -- there's a straight line running from A. E. Van Vogt's Slan through Dune to Ender's Game and beyond -- but I wouldn't call their presentation the dominant mode of the sf I used to read. I wonder what underlying shift occurred to change this.