Kevin's Watch

In the first and second chronicles, the villians were great. This go around, egads! First, there were too many. But let's look at each one:

Foul - did he do anything at all? In the first, he was active. In the second, he had an actual plan. Here, he supposedly whispered but I'm still not sure to who (Roger?) and about what. I don't see how he really drove any of the events leading to the waking of the worm.

Roger - At least, he had a plan and fallbacks. However, even if he rode out the end of the world, what was he going to do after that? Just played the angry son all series long with no character insight or development.

Kastenessen - his ending seemed an overly cheap cop out. Never got to know him either. At least, he made sense from a motivation standpoint (unlike most of this list).

Joan - insane and not in an interesting way. More or less existed to justify time travel.

Ravers - they did very little compared to the past. At best, we had a been there, done that feeling on what they did. Also, for all 10 books, I have never gotten why they were helping Foul to end the world. I'm sure they knew that was the eventual goal as they weren't idiots, but wouldn't they just be dead after that.

Skurj/Sandgordons/Cavewrights/Others - body count

Esmer - my most hated character in all the Chronicles. He seemed 100% pure plot device that could have been eliminated by better writing and I don't even begin to understand his motivations. I will help you and betray you.... Huh? Just horrible.

SHE - not sure if she is a true villian but felt like padding to give Linden something to do or a cheap way to knock Foul down at the end. My opinion is that she was added late in the game to solve some problems SRD was having with the ending.

Croyel - the best of the bad lot, but still a second tier villian.

I think the books would have been better if the villian count had been halved.

Note: I just finished and will admit that I did skip parts (especially AATE) so maybe I missed something.

Like you, slickthomas, I was seriously underwhelmed by the villains in the Last Chrons. I was especially disappointed by how poorly Lord Foul was portrayed. His majesty, dignity and general presence were diminished to the point where his speeches became so bland that they could be found in a soap opera

I too found Esmer one of the most annoying characters in the LCs. I couldn't empathise with him and could find no real reason for his presence in the story. I also found his very existence annoying. I found the idea of there being offspring from a union between the Merewives and a Haruchai so outlandish and peripheral to the story as to be borderline ridiculous.

Although they were not really villains I think that the only new(ish) characters that we are introduced to in the LCs that I found interesting were the Viles. Something about them added to my understanding of the story overall (not detracted as many other elements seemed to).

The croyel too managed to come out of the LCs with some of its mystery unscathed.

u.

ussusimiel wrote: Although they were not really villains I think that the only new(ish) characters that we are introduced to in the LCs that I found interesting were the Viles. Something about them added to my understanding of the story overall (not detracted as many other elements seemed to).

I like the Viles too. If anything, I wanted more on them.

Esmer was one of my favorite characters. At least we actually got to see him, to know him. He was developed and complex (unlike Kasty, Roger, Foul, et al).

But most of the other villains were either empty plot devices or entirely symbolic. You can't really call them characters at all.

I must admit that I also found Esmer the second most compelling character in the LCs (after Stave, but ahead of Mahrtiir). Okay, there wasn't a huge amount of competition...

Yes, the "villains" as Z has said were either blatant dei ex machinae or allegorically symbolic and as such aren't really characters, but rather representative archetypes.

Fair enough, I suppose, but I'm on record elsewhere as stating my opinion that SRD should have taken a lot more care with the demands of narrative (plot feasibility, dramatic pacing, detailed and credible characterisation etc etc) if he'd wanted to make his allegorizing more palatable (as he certainly succeeded in doing in both the 1st and 2nd Chrons).

I was quite disappointed and underwhelmed with Kastenessen's long drawn-out appearance.

Esmer I found quite compelling, I always felt SRD had a lot of fun with that characters' misery and torment.
The Harrow was another who was somewhat villainous and was written with a certain relish.

But overall I agree with the premise of the OP; the LC villains contained little of the visceral terror of a Fleshharrower or Kinslaughter or Pietten or even Nom (or the creepiness of the Kasreyn). They were too often rendered abstract; or in the case of the more beast-like skurj and sandgorgons, uninteresting.

Roger was ultimately underdeveloped; he was good in the ROTE opening and also disguised as TC in FR, but he became more and more peripheral to the story - SRD just wrote too many villains to give any of them a decent airing really.

I did dig the croyel too, actually ...

I didn't like Esmer all that much. His dichotomic nature felt too much like a concept and not enough like a person.

I was hoping we would have had more of Foul's history in the earth. that part of Covenant's flashbacks wherein he had some inkling into Foul was really cool but SRD didn't explore this enough to (re) make Foul into a more interesting character. What I did like early in the series was the number of different interests that the various "enemies" had. wished that would have been developed more. e.g. make Roger into something other than what he ended up being--there were some hints of that but it didn't go anywhere. Also the insequent characters seemed to just fizzle out