our light is our voice

Over on esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day.

I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)

By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.

I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").

our light is our voice

Over on esmestrella I've talked sometimes about how Severus is one of only a tiny handful of characters in Harry Potter that are "alive" to me, and about the only one who "has a voice". (I've pursued that thought a little into "only things with voices are alive", but the woo-woo metaphysics of that, including what exactly I mean by "voice" in that context, is something for another time.) Buried in the comments on a recent pottersues post is a little discussion on The Dragonriders of Pern, which reminded me that I brought up just that example when talking about this a little with enotsola the other day.

I had been reading Nerilka's Story because it was there in the bathroom, and I remarked on how flat all the characters seemed. I thought about it a bit, and in my opinion that's the case for most of the series. A lot of the characters have no "voice". And like Harry Potter, there's a fairly small group of breakaways -- Mnementh, Ruth, Ramoth, Lessa, Manora, F'nor (not so much F'lar), Menolly, Piemur, Fandarel -- and as with Severus, there's one who is the instant "oh, hands down, he's the strongest": Masterharper Robinton. (enotsola immediately agreed with me on this point; YMMV.) Don't get me wrong, I like the Pern series; just I think that writing multidimensional characters that seem to naturally grow out of their environments was not really Anne McCaffrey's strong suit here. (She did much better with the Harper Hall trilogy, I think. Dragonsinger -- the one in the middle -- was the book that got me into Pern in the first place.)

By contrast, though many characters in, say, The Lord of the Rings are certainly minor, I don't have a feel-memory of thinking that any of them are flat. (I've read it what, four or five times?) It's not really fair to compare either of these two relatively light fantasy series to LotR, so take with grain of salt, but I was just observing the phenomenon. Almost everyone comes off the page in De Lint's Newford stories, too, which is closer to Harry Potter and Pern for scope.

I'm not that widely read in fiction, though, so I'm curious what other characters y'all would place in this category of Quendi (in the sense of "speakers; those who speak with voices").

(no subject)

I had a strange thought tonight.

My state in life is so breathtakingly fortunate that I can afford to once a week take forty gallons of perfectly good drinking water, expend fuel to heat it, adulter it so as to be undrinkable, and then simply pour it down the goddamn drain -- all for my own pleasure.

That's called "taking a shower".

Gratitude crops up in odd places sometimes...

(no subject)

I had a strange thought tonight.

My state in life is so breathtakingly fortunate that I can afford to once a week take forty gallons of perfectly good drinking water, expend fuel to heat it, adulter it so as to be undrinkable, and then simply pour it down the goddamn drain -- all for my own pleasure.

That's called "taking a shower".

Gratitude crops up in odd places sometimes...