Steven Erikson is no stranger, despite his pretense of universal fairness or understanding, to sowing or implying petty, irrational resentments here and there. And I think dragons in general might be his most high-status target. Whenever dragons appear, he wrecks them brutally and with apparent relish - even if it's a transformed character he otherwise appears to like, and he badmouths them at every turn in the pettiest, most irrational, irrelevant manner. For example in Toll The Hounds he speaks about Silanah in a retrospective through the thoughts of another character as the worst thing that dragon has done (just aside from fighting on behalf of Anomander Rake, which of course is good, and getting wrecked, but whatever...): "Five Soletaken Tiste Andii whirling round her like crows escorting an eagle." (Silanah fleeing from the Jaghut Tyrant after being brutally wrecked.)
This image, of utterly irrelevant pettiness about the juxtaposition of the protected dragon (wrecked badly) and Tiste Andii (serving), is supposed to evoke the worst sentiments of anything that happens in the book series EVER! (Almost anything else can be talked about.) And I bet Erikson just forgot his gnashing of teeth over those Soletaken Almost-dragons (grrrgh!) by way of priority.
Aside from the irrational hate of dragons, which is absurd and rather annoying enough, one can't ignore how unbelievable LOW Erikson regularly gets, even if one is ready to admire him for all his other achievements and depth...
This post has been edited by MattK3: 20 November 2019 - 03:24 AM