Kevin's Watch

I shall provide my counter-points, merely to show that my love for the Saviour and Redeemer of the World is not based on ignoring objections

Sherman Landlearner wrote: My hatred is simple.
1. They're called the chronicles of COVENANT, not Avery. I'd like the MAIN character to actually be a character the whole time. Odd half coma things kinda render him.. irrelevant. A vegetable can't really be the main character here.

I can understand this critique... we come with expectations, and they better be met, dagnammit! However, I do not agree with Del Rey that "A Tarzan story can not have Jane as a main character". There are various examples from classical literature and some recent where not holding to "whose story it is" not only did not ruin the story, but the story turned out to be pretty amazing. Examples: Anna Karenina, The Agamemnon, The various King Henry the Sixth plays, The Lord of the Rings, Titus Groan, The Horse and His Boy (a Chronicle of Narnia that, much like The Magician's Nephew, Takes place mostly outside of Narnia... to tell the truth, so does The Silver Chair and Voyage of the Dawn Treader.)

2. More importantly, she whines. Forever. TC sees his issues, sees his crimes, and acts. He doesn't whine about his life. He lives one. LA lives, yeah, but her actions all come off as a background to her incessant internal catalog of what has been done to her, and her contradicting herself, saying it's her own fault, then denying it again, and learning nothing from her circling and all too shallow thoughts. Put a little shorter, we GET IT. Your childhood sucked. You became a doctor for the wrong reasons. And you wanna do better, but you find it really, really hard to do so. You can stop rephrasing it. Please.

This, I do not quite understand. In the first chronicles, Covenant spends most of his time literally doing nothing. He does not act (at least in any meaningful way) until towards the end. He may not vocalize his frustrations to the characters, but he sure obsesses about them in his mind a lot.... and wanders comatose in a forest for a bit muttering "hate?" for a bit.

Ultimately, the idea is where the character ultimately ends up. Linden, by the end of the Second Chronicles, is at a pretty high point of characterization. She accomplishes this despite her flaws.

TC does spend most of the first chrons doing nothing, but lots of other people are doing lots of other stuff all around him while he does it. (I don't hate Linden by the way but I'm not a big Third Chrons fan as yet.)

Undecided, but I like her. That is, I don't think whether I like or dislike her is really relevant.

If there's anything I would judge her by in particular, it's her actions in the beginning of the 3rd chrons - the extent to which anything prior in her life should have given her a better attitude of how to handle the trouble that happened there.

Holsety wrote:Undecided, but I like her. That is, I don't think whether I like or dislike her is really relevant.

If there's anything I would judge her by in particular, it's her actions in the beginning of the 3rd chrons - the extent to which anything prior in her life should have given her a better attitude of how to handle the trouble that happened there.

Are you refering to the pre-Land problems or her post-transportation behaviour (which I confess I can't clearly remember as being exeptionally good or bad - just the usual re-adjustment period of getting to re-know the much changed Land. I agree that Linden's experiences both with her parents and in the Land should have given her a good grounding for dealing with the new circumstances she found on her second visit to the Land.......but did they not?

peter wrote:

Holsety wrote:Undecided, but I like her. That is, I don't think whether I like or dislike her is really relevant.

If there's anything I would judge her by in particular, it's her actions in the beginning of the 3rd chrons - the extent to which anything prior in her life should have given her a better attitude of how to handle the trouble that happened there.

Are you refering to the pre-Land problems or her post-transportation behaviour (which I confess I can't clearly remember as being exeptionally good or bad - just the usual re-adjustment period of getting to re-know the much changed Land. I agree that Linden's experiences both with her parents and in the Land should have given her a good grounding for dealing with the new circumstances she found on her second visit to the Land.......but did they not?

I was more referring to the thing with Roger and stuff. I guess I'm putting more weight on whether Linden should be genre-savvy enough to really worry about Roger having a "supernatural" or "land-focused" bent, even though she's sort of in the "real world." But I haven't thought about that section very much, and so I really don't know if she acted about as well as could be expected, or in line with what we'd expect her to care about, or not.

The in-land stuff is different. I think the books give us a lot more information on how to judge those kinds of actions and events than most of the characters involved get. I can understand other readers would have strong opinions about what Linden might do, but I don't feel like I understand the sections she's in as well.

Also, her strong association with the staff of law is kind of "hard" because of the way that laws have gotten bent out of shape (IMO). Like Sunder and Hollian, she's treading in relatively unknown territory AFAICT.

I think it would be safe to say that neither does Linden understand the sections she's in as well, and thus sustained coherence in her actions might be too much to expect. (I hasten to add I would really need to do a re-read of this section with these things in mind to comment properly - the details are hazy at best ) Certainly she's treading uncertain terratories and her behavior is 'reaction' based. She is certain of the Lands reality even at the start of the 3rd Chrons - Fouls encroachments into her 'real' world have seen to that and Rogers behavior can only have confirmed this. But her over-riding emotion in these first sections is fear - not for herself but for Jeremiah for whom (I think) she knows Foul will come. The behavior of people in acute fear is always going to be hard to predict.