[Hinter]

H.D., on 01 January 2010 - 04:23 AM, said:

Hinter, on 01 January 2010 - 03:48 AM, said:

Lister of Smeg, on 13 October 2009 - 11:33 AM, said:

I love all the different POVs from the army. In most stories, you only get to know the commanders so if the army gets massacred it's just numbers that are lost. With the Bonehunters, all these soldiers are shown as real people, with real lives and real motivations. I think SE's done a wonderful job in creating a cast of so many soldiers in the same army while still making them different enough that I care about each and every one of them. When the Nah'ruk started slaughtering them I felt it a lot more than I would have if we had only met Fid's squad, for example.

Just been revisiting a few threads that I started aeons ago.

Firstly, I agree with you Lister - that's why we love SE's work, but are a few characters not becoming a bit "safe"?

My original point was that SE has certainly shown that no one major character was safe from grisly death, in the early books at least. However, now there do seem to to be some characters that will survive no matter what is thrown at them, and to me that creates a safety zone for these characters and lessens the tensions when they are knee deep in trouble.

I want to mention Joe Abercrombie's books which a friend recently lent me and I thoroughly enjoyed, but my visits have been infrequent recently and I can't remember how to spoiler stuff!! What happened to the BB code help button???

They'll survive as long as SE wants them in the story. Trull? Whiskeyjack? Kalam? Rake? How about Logen Ninefingers. He's worst than the damned rest of Malaz multiplied by a billion. Any comparison here with Abercrombie fails at every level known to man.

You misunderstand me - that is exactly the point I wanted to make but without spoilers couldn't:

Spoiler

The fact that Logen Ninefingers was so "hard" that no-one could kill him spoiled what was an enjoyable read.

In fact that is the entire point of this thread - I like authors who are not afraid to kill their "Big Guns". As I said, the fact that several major players were killed off in the first few books made me an SE addict and keep me reading.

PS - Thank you Hetan for the computermagigery help!

[Clip]

Regarding POV (specifically the Short-Tails): Just like everything else in these books, pov is used by SE as a tool to manipulate readers (it is what authors do with books after all, manipulate our thoughts.)

I think the reason we have not had a Short-Tail pov) and probably never will is to make them unknowable, to keep the mystery alive. To have a Short-Tail pov will take something away from them, their alienness, and make them less interesting, not more.

An example where this has already taken place within the series is with Anomander Rake. We never had Rake's pov, which was why what he did in TtH came as such a surprise. We never knew what he was thinking, what he was planning, and it gave his actions much more impact. The same can be said of Tavore, and probably many others (Crippled God comes to mind).

With all the soldier's pov in the BH, we have so many so that we connect to their humanness, the opposite of what I described above with the Short-Tails.


As for keeping characters alive throughout the series, it is to create a connection with the reader. The reader is there from start to finish, and by having a character (such as QB, or Ganoes) it creates that connection with the story. A brilliant example of this is in Glen Cook's The Black Company series (in my opinion, the only fantasy series that is on par with tMBotF)