Back to annoying characters:))

[wa1w]

Child Jaret Byar is driving me crazy.....listening to audiotapes (2nd time through).  At least many of the other characters show growth throughout the series.  You could re-name the Children of the Light, the Children of not going Anywhere, until Galadedrid shows up.

[Asthereal]

To be fair, the Children of the Light are actually (ironically) infested with darkfriends, so we shouldn't really expect them to make much progress towards the good cause. 😉

But yeah, many characters in the Children of the Light are extremely frustrating to read about.

[Samt]

3 hours ago, Asthereal said:

To be fair, the Children of the Light are actually (ironically) infested with darkfriends, so we shouldn't really expect them to make much progress towards the good cause. 😉

But yeah, many characters in the Children of the Light are extremely frustrating to read about.

In fairness, every power structure in the whole world is infested with dark friends.  I find it helpful to just remind myself that most of the characters aren't supposed to be likable.  

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

It is one of the failings of the books that the "evil" characters are so two dimensional. 

 

The bad guys are just bad. Jaichim Carridin and Hadnan Kadere both had apparent family ties, but these were wholly subservient to being bad. Liandrin is just spiteful and greedy. They nearly are always blinded by greed or hatred or both. 

 

I assume this was an attempt to have a clear contrast between evil and good. A powerful vision of good and evil, as Orson Scott Card proclaimed. Also I cannot overlook that most of them had sold their souls, or were being manipulated by the One Power, that I cannot deny would help remove nuance.

 

But for Byar, who could have been a very interesting character with his conflicting loyalty and cruelty, a strong sense of honour and total lack of empathy, instead was sold down the "bad guy" route, that made him very unsatisfying for a character that features nearly through the entire story.

[Figs and Mice]

I guess the Children of the Light are pretty much a bunch of religious fanatics (plenty such around in our own modern world , alas !) who are not prepared to listen to anything that conflicts with their rigid beliefs. But yes , Byar is annoying in his stubborn and never changing hatreds...  Dain Bornhald on the other hand has more nuance - and ends up doing a good thing for one of our heroes : so they aren't quite all black and white...

[Bugglesley]

On 4/5/2024 at 2:09 PM, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

It is one of the failings of the books that the "evil" characters are so two dimensional. 

 

The bad guys are just bad. Jaichim Carridin and Hadnan Kadere both had apparent family ties, but these were wholly subservient to being bad. Liandrin is just spiteful and greedy. They nearly are always blinded by greed or hatred or both. 

 

I assume this was an attempt to have a clear contrast between evil and good. A powerful vision of good and evil, as Orson Scott Card proclaimed. Also I cannot overlook that most of them had sold their souls, or were being manipulated by the One Power, that I cannot deny would help remove nuance.

 

But for Byar, who could have been a very interesting character with his conflicting loyalty and cruelty, a strong sense of honour and total lack of empathy, instead was sold down the "bad guy" route, that made him very unsatisfying for a character that features nearly through the entire story.

 

That's what someone with a "strong sense of honour and a total lack of empathy is." A bad guy. It's not until the Brando books, sure, but you see Galad realize this in real time; as he sees the people most like him from the outside, and realizes that when you don't live inside a palace 'just always do the right thing' isn't quite so simple, and can have some ironic consequences.

 

Honor without empathy describes most people who commit crimes against humanity. The natural human impulse is to dismiss such examples and say "well they weren't really honorable, duh"; yet in doing so, it reveals why it's evil in the first place. Honor is not objective. Their honor was not objective, and our honor is not objective. However, it lets us think it is. If our judgement of what to do is some abstract, self-serving "code" (that we, of course, are free to interpret as our motivated reasoning defines) and not the actual, living humans we interact with, we too are bad guys. We are laundering our regular, base, human desires through "honor" and it comes out the other side looking like the Objective Truth Of The Light.

 

And along those lines, I think RJ does a good job of highlighting something about evil that I think is fundamentally real: the beginning is complicated, but the now is extremely simple. People have all kinds of reasons for getting into a criminal enterprise, for starting to embezzle, for signing on to the job at that investment firm. But the now, the moment when you're hurting someone for your own gain, is extremely simple. Carridin had all kinds of reasons for becoming a darkfriend, but now what he does is hurt people and try to get ahead. The magic isn't even required: as Verin shows, the process for becoming a Darkfriend isn't like being turned; you're linked to the dark one but it doesn't excise your original personality in the same way.

 

RJ's doing "Just say no" to moral absolutism and evil. Even then, I think the villain writing in WoT is a strength and not a weakness. The evil in WoT is incredibly complicated! Sure, there's no dumb Thanos "wah wah I had to sacrifice my own daughter in order to do semi-omnicide" :C moments. On the other hand, the good guys repeatedly win because the Forsaken are competing with one another and their schemes overlap and clash. The darkfriends are all selfish, petty monsters, but they are each selfish and petty in their own peculiar ways, bouncing off each other and our heroes. Fain offers us an evil that itself hates and seeks to destroy the categorical, mystical evil of the world. I think all of this works better than having villains that monologue about how they deserve to do evil things because their dad was mean to them or whatever.

Edited April 8 by Bugglesley

[Samt]

3 hours ago, Bugglesley said:

 

That's what someone with a "strong sense of honour and a total lack of empathy is." A bad guy. It's not until the Brando books, sure, but you see Galad realize this in real time; as he sees the people most like him from the outside, and realizes that when you don't live inside a palace 'just always do the right thing' isn't quite so simple, and can have some ironic consequences.

 

Honor without empathy describes most people who commit crimes against humanity. The natural human impulse is to dismiss such examples and say "well they weren't really honorable, duh"; yet in doing so, it reveals why it's evil in the first place. Honor is not objective. Their honor was not objective, and our honor is not objective. However, it lets us think it is. If our judgement of what to do is some abstract, self-serving "code" (that we, of course, are free to interpret as our motivated reasoning defines) and not the actual, living humans we interact with, we too are bad guys. We are laundering our regular, base, human desires through "honor" and it comes out the other side looking like the Objective Truth Of The Light.

 

And along those lines, I think RJ does a good job of highlighting something about evil that I think is fundamentally real: the beginning is complicated, but the now is extremely simple. People have all kinds of reasons for getting into a criminal enterprise, for starting to embezzle, for signing on to the job at that investment firm. But the now, the moment when you're hurting someone for your own gain, is extremely simple. Carridin had all kinds of reasons for becoming a darkfriend, but now what he does is hurt people and try to get ahead. The magic isn't even required: as Verin shows, the process for becoming a Darkfriend isn't like being turned; you're linked to the dark one but it doesn't excise your original personality in the same way.

 

RJ's doing "Just say no" to moral absolutism and evil. Even then, I think the villain writing in WoT is a strength and not a weakness. The evil in WoT is incredibly complicated! Sure, there's no dumb Thanos "wah wah I had to sacrifice my own daughter in order to do semi-omnicide" :C moments. On the other hand, the good guys repeatedly win because the Forsaken are competing with one another and their schemes overlap and clash. The darkfriends are all selfish, petty monsters, but they are each selfish and petty in their own peculiar ways, bouncing off each other and our heroes. Fain offers us an evil that itself hates and seeks to destroy the categorical, mystical evil of the world. I think all of this works better than having villains that monologue about how they deserve to do evil things because their dad was mean to them or whatever.

I completely agree.  I have been confused by the criticism that WoT doesn't have complicated villains, because there are lots of villains with good diversity and many of them are complicated.  Of course, some of them are simple or don't get explored, but that doesn't equate to not having complicated villains.

 

I will say that WoT doesn't have sympathetic villains.  There is a modern fashion in writing where villains should be sympathetic and make good points.  And that can be interesting sometimes, but it's very overdone at this point.  WoT has great villains.  And a lot of times evil people are evil because they are selfish and callous.  They don't all need deep philosophy or trauma.

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

They are two dimensional and childish. No one is evil for evil's sake - everyone thinks that they are right and morally correct. Ishamael is interesting because of his motivation. Daved Hanlon you could say was a classic sadistic psychopath. But bad guy after bad guy were motivated by lust for power, greed, and hatred, self recognised and chosen because they were just bad to the core. They had no motivations beyond personal enrichment even though it was obvious what they were involved in was more likely to end up in painful, humiliating death in the short term, yet they were convinced by vague promises of life eternal and power and some later and vague date. 

 

However much you may not agree with the criticism, denying that most of the bad guys were cardboard cutouts compared to characters like Ingtar or Verin, that were evil and acted evil because they were evil only shows that you weren't paying a lot of attention when you were reading the books. It's totally fine that you like the way the book is written, totally fine that you wished they had flourished capes and twirled mustaches more, but trying to claim they were believable rounded characters with human motivations is just false, no matter what your opinion is. 

[Samt]

51 minutes ago, HeavyHalfMoonBlade said:

They are two dimensional and childish. No one is evil for evil's sake - everyone thinks that they are right and morally correct. Ishamael is interesting because of his motivation. Daved Hanlon you could say was a classic sadistic psychopath. But bad guy after bad guy were motivated by lust for power, greed, and hatred, self recognised and chosen because they were just bad to the core. They had no motivations beyond personal enrichment even though it was obvious what they were involved in was more likely to end up in painful, humiliating death in the short term, yet they were convinced by vague promises of life eternal and power and some later and vague date. 

 

However much you may not agree with the criticism, denying that most of the bad guys were cardboard cutouts compared to characters like Ingtar or Verin, that were evil and acted evil because they were evil only shows that you weren't paying a lot of attention when you were reading the books. It's totally fine that you like the way the book is written, totally fine that you wished they had flourished capes and twirled mustaches more, but trying to claim they were believable rounded characters with human motivations is just false, no matter what your opinion is. 

Good talk.  Glad you're here to tell me I'm wrong because you say so.  

[HeavyHalfMoonBlade]

No you are wrong because you saying that the motivations of a character are somehow matters of opinion rather than fact. That you think they are well written is quite different from them having rounded motivations.

 

It is not about a degree of complexity - it is a degree of how they are defined as being bad. They are petty and shortsighted, and are bad for being bad in and of itself, even though they have to make huge sacrifices for it personally.

 

Saying you are confused by the criticism does not refute that criticism, nor does it mean that your opinions are somehow given more weight. You not understanding the criticisms on reflects on your ability to understand the issue, and not favourably on your ability to pass judgement upon it.

[Kalessin]

Getting back to the topic, I think the characterisation of Lanfear as evil is somewhat lacking because she doesn't twirl her moustache ...

 

Seriously, I thought RJ made Byar a monomaniac,which fitted his purpose in the series reasonably well. However, where he slipped up was failing to bring out the reason, unlike Muadh, whose one-line characterisation gives an excellent reason why he should hate Darkfriends. I suspect Byar's just one in a long line of fanatics, but it would've been better to have had some more detail.

[mogi68]

I don't think it's unrealistic that there would be people who are evil for evil's sake considering the cosmology of the universe. If we had a primal force of chaos that was manifested in our world, it would likely have many followers.

[Taimandred]

The most frustrating thing for me is that, it just seems like the bad guys were born bad. I cannot remember a single character being recruited or converted to the dark side. We hear how each Forsaken converted purely because they came from an era of peace and tranquility. All others seem to just be born into it. I know some obscure characters rethink their path to the dark, but all were insidious to start with.

 

As far as I can tell, since the first book, no named character who was not a dark friend becomes a dark friend aside from Taim's forced conversions in the appropriately named Black Tower (Rand was completely insane by then, I'm sure).