It's Been A Long Time Since I've Played This...

[redbrunja]

A game of cliff, shag, or marry!

 

(Where you give me three people and I pick who I'd shag, who I'd marry, and who I'd push off a cliff.)

Comments

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

I was never fond of Jaenelle to begin with, but Daemon started getting old after the second reading and with each new book just...gets older. And yes, what Daemon did to Surreal threw me harder than anything else he did because that was such a betrayal, a violation of the relationship they had, (psuedo siblings, with him in the position of elder sibling) and done without the 'good intentions' of his false betrayal at the end of the series.

I can't deny that it was a good authorial choice, but I did dislike that the author seemed to agree with Surreal's idea that it was her fault and that she was the one who broke the relationship. She was smashed and stupid and young.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

Really? What didn't work for you with Jaenelle?

I really liked the two of them and were rooting for them, but each new story with them... it just becomes more and more clear that they're too perfect to be good characters.

And doesn't Daemon think to himself in one of the recent stories that it WAS his fault, and that basically that she WAS young and stupid and smashed and that he should have known that?

[ivy-chan.livejournal.com]

It's not that I didn't like her as a person so much as...everything about her as a character rubbed me the wrong way. I didn't like that she had every single power known to man and got her cake and ate it, too. (Twilight's Dawn-based.) I didn't like that she did no wrong and when she did make mistakes it was the moral pass mistake, when her mistakes were borne only out of her pure love and noble protectiveness.

I didn't like that everyone on the good side loved her infinitely, and anyone who disagreed with her was either evil or delusional. I didn't like that, like Daemon, everyone put up with her temper tantrums when they were the scary 'I'm powerful' kind. The theatrics annoyed me rather than impressed me, maybe because of Bishop's writing style. (I got really tired of the 'midnight voice'. I wanted someone to ask her what was up with that. It makes me think of Batman's voice change in the Dark Knight film.)

I didn't like that she fell into the 'I'm super powerful but god forbid I have ambition' prototype, as well as being a powerful queen who was meant to be a protector figure...but blew it for me when she did nothing to protect anyone until Kaetian died, despite her knowing about the horrors and tyranny that the Blood war was causing. It would have been fine if the narrative had actually called her on being a non-pro-active queen. I had a whole bunch of external factors and storytelling issues with her. My like for the character tends to fluctuate.


I don't remember reading that. Was it in the one where Surreal and the dance instructor get stuck in a haunted house of evil? I admit that most of my thoughts on the series are based on the trilogy themselves and Dreams Made Flesh, since I've read those the most.

[redbrunja.livejournal.com]

All very valid points.

Honestly, I think I would have had less patience with Jaenelle were I reading her NOW for the first time, as opposed to much younger, when I had come across less Mary Sue type characters.

And yeah, that was from the Haunted House one. Actually, I'm looking forward to Bishop's newest, which has a whole new cast of just about all lesser jeweled characters. I hope that having that set up curbs some of the OMGSUPERSPECIALPOWERFUL.