The most unneeded character?

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greyy
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Post by greyy »

A lot of the characters which we may think are useless served only to advance parts of the plot, like guest characters... Alba, Scroyle, Carmel, Lind, etc... I dont consider them useless, in fact as literary tools, they were perhaps the most useful characters aside from the obvious main characters. Without them the story would seem bland, they provided the texture that made the story come alive.

One character I could have lived without was Ciro. He especially annoyed me in the end ("I can do it")... I thought that SDR seemed to use the same descriptive passages with him over and over and it got tiresome fast. His presence in the story was to frequent to be considered a support character, so imo, he was the most useless.

Thtas not to say he didnt have his shining moments, like when he fumbled onto Milos' weapon on Trumpet, that was one of my favorite parts of book 3, and certainly his heroism at his end, after he annoyed me for so long. It was really a shame that he couldnt get over Sorus' scheme, I felt that was a little lame, I mean, he should have been able to get over it, and become a better hero... thus is the use of characters as disposable literary tools.
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CovenantJr
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Post by CovenantJr »

Reverendinium wrote:
Sorus wrote:I'll second that.
I'll third it. The Gap owns TC.
Pfft.

That's all I have to say on the matter.
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Holsety
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Post by Holsety »

Turiya Foul wrote:Liete Carregio. The. Most. Useless. Character. Ever.

And Alba. Parmute, was it?U. S. E. L. E. S. S.
Alba was one of Nick's old interests, right? She at least served to show how Nick treated other people a little more, stuff like that. I'd say Darrin Scroyle was more useless.

But queen of all uselessness was Darrin Scryole's wife/sister/cousin/whatever that was on his ship with him. I'm not even sure she got a line, though she was at the very least referenced to, y'know, exist. Which kinda wasted time.
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CovenantJr
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Post by CovenantJr »

That's true. She did speak, but that's about it. To me, it seems she's the result of one of three things:

1) SRD likes to make sure all his characters are actually characters, rather than just names who perform a handy action, so he added her to flesh out Scroyle a bit.

2) She's a decoy; SRD was tricking us into thinking Scroyle and Free Lunch were going to stick around longer.

3) SRC intended to do more with Scroyle, then changed his mind.

Knowing how meticulously SRD plans his books, I find option 3 the least likely, but I can buy either of the others.
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drew
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Post by drew »

Does she perhaps relate somewhat to a charactor in the RIng Cycle somehow?
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Post by Dirty Whirl »

Haha, about the captain of free lunch
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"He was reliable and good at his job, and took care of his crew like family."

The woman he was having sex with in his cabin was his cousin.
She looked like a crowned vestal, somehow both powerful and fragile, as if she could shatter his bones with a glance and yet would fall from her seat at the touch of a single hurled handful of mud. She daunted him.
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Post by Savor Dam »

Alesha Hardaway, Scroyle's second, his cousin and his lover...remains the character I would most like to meet.

The few paragraphs SRD devotes to her illuminate her so well. Like Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing, she is a minor character who still registers with the reader at multiple levels. Unneeded? Those who think so completely misunderstand why she was written.
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Holsety
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Post by Holsety »

Hmm.

Looking back, I feel like I still don't understand the importance of any of the characters. There are more useless characters, though, and what I mean by this is - subjectively, of course - their relative lack of intersection with other characters. That is, the world of the Free Lunch is consolidated in real time, and very little of it gets out into the rest of the perceived world (I mean, the world that I spend time reading about).

I suppose that might be what most worlds might be like. This sort of thinking is gone along in "If a tree falls..."

I like, in hindsight, that the Free Lunch's destruction indicates the cavalier treatment a mercenary ship - or any ship, or individual - might be given when it's engaged in double-crossing somewhat unintentionally as a result of having no idea wtf its employers really want from it, in part because its employers are engaged in double-crossing themselves (that is, Warden is intentionally trying to double-cross Holt, Hashi IIRC is at least cursorily interested in not double-crossing Warden but does not actually know what Warden wants, and incidentally believes him to be much less ambitious than he is, therefore, he is double-crossing Warden at times).

(A bit of a forward apology/justification, which should address why I am posting the above with a weak memory of what I'm posting about):
Spoiler
(It's possible this assertion isn't supported at all by the book, but IIRC the Free Lunch engages in shooting down an Amnion ship, or Soar, which it had been operating in alliance with prior, because its mission was to capture when they had decided to kill, or vice versa. I suspect that the mechanisms which bring about this attack were intentionally made to resemble other decisions in which people end up destroying themselves in the process of, for lack of a better way of putting it, advancing the plot. I think one could get some mileage out of saying they suffer from symptoms resembling a less exaggerated gap sickness from an objective point of view.)

(Nick, in particular, I think has a tenaciously horrible and stupid destructive urge that makes him repulsive - I think what makes me dislike him in comparison to Morn and Angus isn't even the actions and backstory that gives him a relative presence or lack of justification, but that he goes about his behavior amongst the support of an apparently competent crew. Incidentally, he somewhat resembles Jack Vance's Kirth Gersen of The Demon Princes, though probably also a fair number of other pulp sci-fi heroes?)

Of course, that this gap in worlds has some relation to gap sickness is, IIRC, explicitly stated in the books, and to be honest I mostly find this aspect more interesting in terms of the effect of the communication devices than the fast transit of people provided by the gap drive - in terms of effects on personality...
So in comparison, Free Lunch's apparent lack of conflict (I mean superficially, looking back) seems rather ideal. What remains on my mind is whether that lack of internal conflict had a role in making them a particularly effective mercenary from the perspective of others (Hashi in this case, but presumably they took other jobs). I still don't understand why they are particularly important compared to, say, the ship that Angus "sold" to the Amnion, the ship that failed to go after him (crewed by a later kaze), the crew of the ship that Morn was on, etc.

I can speculate about the nature of the extended cast of the Gap books, and it's good to have reminders that they exist, but if the core cast isn't getting much information about them, AND we more or less side with the inevitability of the overall plot (as we aren't actors in it :D ), it's hard to take their interesting attributes as having an important impact on the overall story.

OK, so I forgot why I was making this post, let me get back to the crux of the question,
I still got NO clue why you folks are hammering on about cousin sex, unless it's something about how incest makes even better mercenaries/soldiers/ship crew than the homoerotic approach, or is just less complicated than a crew of misfits, survivor misfits (Trumpet), Military-Police, Borg (Borg - I mean Amnion), or corporates (Space-Fort Holt).

I gotta buy the first one or two Gap books again so I can read through and develop my own opinion. :biggrin:
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Post by stockman1187 »

Reisheiruhime wrote:Liete Carregio. The. Most. Useless. Character. Ever.

And Alba. Parmute, was it?U. S. E. L. E. S. S.
I must disagree that Liete Carriegio was useless. Her bereaved need for Nick made her useful to him and, in my opinion, served to illustrate how he used and discarded women
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Post by Hashi Lebwohl »

Holsety wrote:I like, in hindsight, that the Free Lunch's destruction indicates the cavalier treatment a mercenary ship - or any ship, or individual - might be given when it's engaged in double-crossing somewhat unintentionally as a result of having no idea wtf its employers really want from it, in part because its employers are engaged in double-crossing themselves (that is, Warden is intentionally trying to double-cross Holt, Hashi IIRC is at least cursorily interested in not double-crossing Warden but does not actually know what Warden wants, and incidentally believes him to be much less ambitious than he is, therefore, he is double-crossing Warden at times).

So in comparison, Free Lunch's apparent lack of conflict (I mean superficially, looking back) seems rather ideal. What remains on my mind is whether that lack of internal conflict had a role in making them a particularly effective mercenary from the perspective of others (Hashi in this case, but presumably they took other jobs). I still don't understand why they are particularly important compared to, say, the ship that Angus "sold" to the Amnion, the ship that failed to go after him (crewed by a later kaze), the crew of the ship that Morn was on, etc.
I think Free Lunch (hired by my namesake) gives us some more insight into the cost of innocent bystanders caught up in various machinations when the people pulling the strings do not really know exactly what is happening. Although mercenaries--and presumably they have done things that have been illegal or immoral over the years--in this case Free Lunch is "innocent" because they were not given the full facts. Scroyle was smart, though, and was pretty sure that he had not been given all the facts; he simply didn't know how high the stakes were. They knew Soar was an Amnion-backed illegal but Free Lunch itself was another classic case of "in the wrong place at the wrong time".

Although personally distasteful to us, in that situation an incestual crew of mercenaries makes sense. A regular mercenary, especially a new hire, might betray the crew at some point if the price is right but almost no one will betray their own family.

I wouldn't say that Free Lunch is important, per se, but their arrival on the scene helped resolve the standoff by introducing an unknown into the equation.
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Post by Holsety »

stockman1187 wrote:
Reisheiruhime wrote:Liete Carregio. The. Most. Useless. Character. Ever.

And Alba. Parmute, was it?U. S. E. L. E. S. S.
I must disagree that Liete Carriegio was useless. Her bereaved need for Nick made her useful to him and, in my opinion, served to illustrate how he used and discarded women
Alba, IIRC, is the same, but is not as good at her job. If I'm not incorrect, Nick - or someone - is more or less considering that at some point she'll be kicked off the ship. So I think she really shows the way in which Nick discards women. He'd probably discard men the same way, too, but I think it's a given that because of his past experiences and, frankly, his gender, women are more likely to climb and fall in the ranks of his ship than men.

Liete is not "particularly" useful as a character in terms of an illustration or "proof" of Nick's personality, IMO, so much as an elaboration of what we already know. What's interesting to me is the extent to which Liete acts in Nick's rational interest (i.e., survival) to an extent that Nick is not acting during the books, probably against her own interest towards the end (though I suppose they probably had little chance to avoid becoming Amnion or Amnion chattel). The language regarding her internal frenzy sort of interested me, and when I checked on it again just now:
Just for a second, Liete's courage failed.
Blast
Those people.
And Trumpet.
Nick was a dead man -
Her whole body flinched as if a stun-prod had been fired into her chest.
-unless she found a way to save him.
In that instant the long black wind swept all her fears and conflicts out of her.
I can't help but think that this sort of apparently very intense emotionally physical reaction, harshly re-directive resembles either the effects a zone implant or gap sickness might have.

There actually is likely enough evidence in the text to make a decent argument that Liete's actions as being attributable to a desire for Nick, and being sustained by the slightest signs that he (rather than the group he is with collectively) is orchestrating a plan where both she/the crew/the ship will be preserved, and him. Ultimately she does seem to become aware that she's going to die if she follows his orders, but follows them anyway. Compared to, say, the Free Lunch, one might say she's very much complicit in her own destruction (and in the deaths of the other crewmembers of Capn's Fancy).

I don't really feel like chasing every possible "lead" that comes to mind, since I haven't read this series in a long time, but I have a suspicion that this chapter was intended to depict someone suffering from gap sickness. I'm not sure if anyone suggests this over the course of the text. 8O However, given the level of insight we have into Liete that's "in the present" compared to Morn while she's on the UCMP ship that her father and mother crewed, it seems like we might develop a better idea as readers of what gap sickness entails and what causes it - assuming SRD had plenty of "veiled" ideas to unearth regarding it.
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Post by Cord Hurn »

Most unneeded Gap character? Well, I honestly could have done without that dancer who mutilates herself at the Ease-and-Sleaze bar in Billingate. But I suppose she served the purpose in the story for showing how slimy Billingate is, so a reader won't feel very bad about its destruction. (Assuming I can count her as a Gap character, even though she has no dialogue other than that you can tell she's thinking, "OUCH!" very loudly.)
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Post by Avatar »

Of course, she got destroyed too...

Thinking on it, I'm surprised by how many characters I didn't like, but that doesn't make them unnecsary. In fact, the ones I liked least were probably among the most necessary. (Taverner and Vestabule come to mind.)

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Post by Cord Hurn »

Didn't care much for Cleatus Fane or Maxim Igensard either, but they were obviously necessary. :)
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Post by Avatar »

Exactly. :lol:

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