What bothers me on principle about Syldor: the man is an ambassador. His ENTIRE JOB is to be a good representative of his people and foster mutually beneficial relationships. If it takes twenty years and his estranged children showing him up by saving the world for him to decide that maybe his society and he in particular could stand to be less of a classist/racist* prick, it's hard for me to feel especially impressed. (*On that note, it looks like the current guide did some strategic editing about mixed ancestry, but the way half-elves were originally described was that humans saw them as a blessing, but elves saw them as impure and as something lesser. The first edition specifically said "the elves of Syngorn have looked on them with contempt." Whether it's currently part of the lore or not, that...kinda set a certain tone about that whole family relationship. It wasn't a great tone.) As for the others: Howaardt suffers in my recollection because that plot was happening right when my own father died, so it's hazy and I frankly don’t want to backtrack to remind myself of the details beyond "Tary eloquently told him off for his failings and I'm glad he said what he did." I’m with you about Thoreau, though. That man’s the worst.
So just to stave off any further questions...to be honest I don't need to know why anyone on an individual level thinks this about Syldor, and I do get that a lot of people don't recall Tary's arc terribly well for a variety of reasons. Call me cynical but "fandom opinions tend towards the less nuanced, and it's very easy for one person's highly specific projection to spread around as The Correct Interpretation" tends to explain it on a broad scale.
That aside, this feels like it seriously misses the point. Taking only 15 years and two visits from his estranged children for him to apologize - even badly - and begin a slow about face against his entire culture, even when he knows it will never be enough to mend the relationship? Quite a lot of real people would, genuinely, do anything for their parents to do the same.
(I also think that Syngorn's xenophobia does need to be considered in the context of "the ambassador from Syngorn to the primarily human society on the continent was assassinated, kicking off a bitter three-decades long war, less than three centuries ago and very possibly in Syldor's living memory." It doesn't make it justified, but the tone-setting is actually like...fairly good world-building that puts this in context.)
It is also rather irritating that in a fandom that loves a redemption arc, someone who has, again, fucked up badly, but then made an honest to attempt to improve, is so frequently thrown in the same (or worse) bucket as a serial gaslighter rather than treated as "kind of an asshole." Which is, to be clear, what I'm arguing. I don't think he's a good person. He was bigoted and took the twins away out of a misplaced sense that they couldn't be happy in a small town with their human mother. I think the twins are justified in being mad at him still. I would not expect them to ever forgive him fully. My point is that there are shades of gray here that are entirely ignored. (This also happens to cross into a more serious issue I have with fandom frequently diminishing some pretty horrific emotional and psychological abuse such as Thoreau's, but that's also a whole different story.)
With all that said I covered Syldor in the original post primarily because I found it particularly hypocritical that in TLOVM, he was as awful as the fandom makes him out to be, and unhappiness with the story shifted to the twins and Percy acting in ways that were consistent with Syldor being worse and with their mental state re: everything else going on being very different than in canon.
I guess the underlying point is that I'm fairly vocal when I find the story isn't hanging together logically, and both C1 and TLOVM do hang together logically. That, again, doesn't obligate anyone to like it, but I do want to observe that it does, in fact, make a lot of sense if one considers the actual canon of how Syldor behaves in each work, and it specifically makes sense for Vex's arc and the changes made to it.
