Brust, Steven - To Reign in Hell

Borrowed from the bookstore because Aliera likes Brust and because I am apparently a sucker for the war in Heaven stories. Another one to add to the back cover hooks...

I really loved it in the beginning, but it kept going downhill, sadly. I adored the introduction and the world of Heaven, in which everything in new (Lilith is the first person to invent gender and is the reason why most of the angels are male) and chaos in the form of flux or cacoastrum battles with order in the form of illiaster. I also loved the play on words, particularly of Genesis. I wish I had a better recollection of Paradise Lost, because I feel many of the angel characters would have been ten times funnier with that knowledge.

My main problem stemmed with the fact that the war in Heaven, obviously a giant even, happens because of a Big Misunderstanding. Actually, about a dozen Big Misunderstandings. I will give Brust that someone is willfully causing said BMs, but the further into the plot I got, the more I wanted to beat my head against a wall and yell at the characters to just talk to each other, damnit! This kind of plot in which the entire thing could be solved if someone would just sit down and talk to the other person really annoys me. Especially when there are about half a dozen near misses. And then, when they finally do talk (Yaweh and Satan), they are absolute idiots.

The second problem I had was that Yaweh and almost everyone on his side were seriously lacking in intelligence. While I am not religious in any way, shape, or form, I do find it rather insulting to have every single person on Yaweh's side be mind-numbingly a) stupid b) holier-than-thou or c) both. With the exception of Raphael. In the end, I was extremely annoyed because it felt like Brust was trying to hammer in the point that Yaweh was horrible and that Christianity was The Big Lie, what with the distortion of Yeshuah and the New Testament. I personally do not take offense at the viewpoint of God as patriarchal and a sort of tyrant in Heaven (as was portrayed here), but I do have a problem with a war that is so incredibly one-sided.

I do realize that Brust was trying to portray Satan as being prey to some of the same faults as Yaweh, including pride at the final meeting, but in the end, the characters that Brust spends the most time with (the Firstborn and a good deal of the archangels) are the ones who end up propping up Satan and opposing Yaweh. It seems to be a rather loaded fight to begin with, in terms of reader sympathy.

Maybe I came in with a completely different mindset -- I read the blurb about the rebellion in Heaven, and immediately I start thinking of larger than life figures! Life and death! You know, all that Paradise Lost stuff. I guess it is partly Brust's point that it is so entirely petty, except... I don't know. I felt like it was supposed to be Significant.

Maybe I will go off and reread Good Omens now.

Thoughts on morality and fiction

I've been kind of mulling over morality and fiction/fictional worlds lately, not sparked by anything in particular. It's more a combination of old AtPo and LJ posts examining the morality of various Buffy and Angel characters, particularly of the reaction to LMPTM, to Jenny-O's post on misogyny and the Connor arc, and to many previous things.

Sometimes I wonder why it matters to us so much that our characters or shows have a moral theme. I hear stuff about Eowyn abandoning her duty to Rohan, and I have that instant in which I feel I must defend her, or something silly like that. Why does it matter so much to me that Eowyn be in the right? And it obviously does, even though intellectually I can appreciate how having these moral dilemmas for her character makes her a much more dynamic and interesting character. And I hate it when characters are always in the moral right, like the Heralds of Valdemar or something. Except, now that I think about it, that's not what bugs me the most. What annoys me the most is that they are not always in the moral right, and yet, everyone treats them as though they were -- they being any fictional character suffering Mary Sue-itis, or being whitewashed somehow. It's that they are making choices which I find morally grey to say the least, such as killing people (no matter what the cause) and suffering no consequence.

( Because it is getting long... )

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Argh, skipped work today because I felt sick, and am now suffering pangs of guilt, especially since today is a buying day.

The worst part is I feel mostly better now. It's hard to tell if it would have just gone away, or if the six extra hours of sleep contributed.

Ugh.

Well, I just got my hands on the new Connie Brockway!