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Okay sorry I'm gonna rant a bit abt some books, feel free to ignore. But.

Just about the most annoying thing ever is when an author sets two characters up in a way that would make an amazing (het) ship, even kinda teases it but then goes the sort of way that the characters are always interrupted before they get even to kissing. And then puts one of the characters in a totally different ship with no chemistry, but nooooo it happens and both the characters yearn for each so much but don't realize the other loves them too because Miscommunication but they finally get each other because they're Soulmates.

And don't get me wrong, I enjoy a lot about Skif and Talia in Heralds of Valdemar as platonic best friends, almost sibling-like dynamic instead of romance. I'm perfectly happy with that, I've never been that hardcore shipper anyway. I do feel teasing the romance was kinda pointless when it didn't lead anywhere, though.

But Talia's romance with Dirk? Oh come on. Dirk appears like... idk, twice, thrice at most, in Arrows of the Queen, and is hardly given a personality there, and interacts with Talia in very... well, neutral is wrong word, but ways that aren't charged with any kind personal feelings towards each other, but rather the emotions they may be feeling are directed towards something else. As I recall, he doesn't really appear in Arrow's Flight either, though he is mentioned every now and then, what with Talia being on cirquit with Kris who'd often worked as partners with Dirk.

Also, in Arrow's Flight, there's this sort of bit of tension between Talia and Kris, at some point going even to sex, and they'd make a fairly good ship too. I feel they work better as friends (and they both decide the sex was fun but they don't truly feel romantically about each other, and that happens in a good healthy way, which I much appreciate), though.

And only in Arrow's Fall there starts to be any real interaction or feeling shown between Talia and Dirk, and that's so full of Miscommunication Drama and neither of them can just fucking talk to each other, which is something I find really annoying. It's sort of played like both of them are already in love by Arrow's Fall, which just feels weird because it comes pretty much out of nowhere at least to me, but they both think the love is unrequited and don't want to act on it, and Dirk spends 96% of the book just angsting about it and getting mad at people and just... there's so much miscommunication and it all could be solved so easily if they could all just fucking speak to each other properly for once and it feels just irritating instead of romantic.

I mean I do like the way Dirk breaks down when Rolan brings the arrows Talia sent (headless meaning a dead herald with Kris' code, broken in half meaning a mission so badly gone wrong that no rescue should be attempted with Talia's code), and the way he and Elspeth and the Companions rescue Talia and he calls her soul back, and the wedding and stuff surrounding it is cute and feels kinda nice. But that's because I love that sort of angst, especially friends/teammates(/lovers) realizing the other character is captured and all that stuff, and with how dark it all went, I do like a bit of fluffy comfort to sweeten the end. Their relationship still feels like it was founded on nothing and came out of nowhere with the only justification being "soulmates", and because of that I don't really feel like they belong together at all. I feel like their dynamic too would have worked better as a friendship.

On the other hand, a relationship I feel would have worked beautifully as romantic was Kris/Dirk. They were cool as friends, too, but so much effort was put into establishing them as very close despite their differences, and perfect partners to each other who could really get the best out of using Gifts combined with someone else when they were using each other's Gifts to do so. Dirk's family knew and liked Kris and considered him practically family, too, they were said to be best buddies in Arrows of the Queen already. They would have been a great ship, but instead Lackey used their friendship for extra drama points in the stupid mess of miscommunication and romance between Talia and Dirk.

And It's just so frustrating to me, that Mercedes Lackey, who usually writes people very well and relationships nicely, managed to screw up not one, but TWO perfectly good ships for the sake of making a ship that doesn't work, out of one from each of those potential ships.

And it can't be called homophobia, not wanting people to think Kris and Dirk were gay, because she established two lesbian romances (which was hinted that it would likely have been a polyamorous relationship between all three instead if Ylsa hadn't died before she and Keren became aware of Jeri's feelings toward them) where the members were soulmates and also in the mentions of legend of Vanyel, Stefen was named as Vanyel's soulmate already in Arrows of the Queem. It couldn't have been that. It had to be her just... being totally blind to the fact that Talia/Skif and Kris/Dirk had much better chemistry.

I'm inclined to forgive her for that. After all the Arrows-trilogy were her first published novels ever as far as I know, and later on she writes really well-written relationships, so I assume it's really just not yet being as good a writer as she would later become. But it's still really really frustrating.

#long post #books #arrows of the queen #arrow's flight #arrows fall #heralds of valdemar #mercedes lackey #fantasy books #relationships in fiction

This isn't the best answer by a long road, but I think it might be somewhere in the right direction. It seems to me that evil is a kind of ultimate greed, a greed that is so all-encompassing that it can't ever see anything lovely, rare, or precious without wanting to possess it. A greed so total that if it can't possess these things, it will destroy them rather than chance that someone else might have them. And a greed so intense that even having these things never causes it to lessen one iota—the lovely, the rare and the precious never affect it except to make it want them. Evil can't create, it can only copy, mar, or destroy, because it's so taken up with itself. So 'good' would also be a kind of selflessness.

Mercedes Lackey, Arrows Fall