(no subject)
It's one hundred percent 
nextian's fault that I zoomed through a comfort reread of Pamela Dean's Secret Country books a week or so ago. I mean, not that I wasn't due for one anyway.
The thing about the Secret Country books, like most of Pamela Dean's books, is that they are hugely flawed and utterly self-indulgent in a way that makes them perfect for me. The basic plot follows five cousins who basically spend all their summers LARPing out a high fantasy plot they made up and have now created an obsessive amount of detail about. Then, of course, they find an actual secret portal to the fantasy land they made up where everyone thinks they're their own avatar characters - half of whom are totally unimportant to the plot, since the kids spent all their time running around playing five million NPCs. Naturally, this causes some problems which will ring hilariously familiar to anyone who has ever been in fandom or has done any kind of RP, ever. Observe:
PRINCESS LAURA: The prettiest, spunkiest, most outgoing, best dancer and horseback rider in the whole castle!
ACTUAL LAURA: Shy, introverted, and terrified of any kind of attention. Also terrified of horses. PROBLEMATIC.
PRINCESS ELLEN: Completely unimportant to the plot.
ACTUAL ELLEN: Would be having the time of her life running around having high fantasy adventures . . . if only Princess Ellen were not so boring and unimportant to the plot!
PRINCE PATRICK: Also completely unimportant to the plot.
ACTUAL PATRICK: Is actually fine with this, since it gives him more time to run around poking holes in fantasyland with a scientific empiricist stick, much to everyone else's exasperation.
LADY RUTH: Extremely mysterious, scheming and powerful sorcerous femme fatale. Engaged to at least two different people and rumored to be carrying on a not-so-secret affair with Prince Edward, who of course is now actually Ruth's baby cousin Ted.
ACTUAL RUTH: Sensible, long-suffering, and increasingly exasperated by everything Lady Ruth chooses to be.
PRINCE EDWARD: Due to over the next few weeks have his father murdered by his closest advisor, inherit the monarchy, lead a war, die, get resurrected by Lady Ruth, then fight a duel with the aforementioned closest advisor and kill him once he confesses his crime.
ACTUAL TED: Increasingly overwhelmed by feelings of WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING, with a huge side order of HELP.
The plot that ensues has unicorns and dragons and magic swords and political scheming and tragic backstory and desperate duels, and poor Ted does actually at one point die and get resurrected, but honestly the real fun of the books is in watching the kids deal with the collision of fiction and reality (it's not really a spoiler to say that the Secret Country is both empirically real and made up by a bunch of kids, and not quite in the way one would expect) and how it feels to be an actor rather than an author - especially when you started out as a pretty Drosselmeyerian author. The pacing is kind of terrible and the plotting by the third book is completely all over the place and I can't even bring myself to care at all, because I enjoy so exactly the meta things that these books are doing and it is also just constantly hilarious to me to watch the kids flail their way around the IC/OOC divide.
(The main flaw that actually bothers me is that Ruth's story should be a central focus of the book, and it isn't. We're constantly told that Ruth is quiet and amiable and the sharper, more sarcastic personality that she starts to take on as Lady Ruth is startling to everyone, but we don't see anything of pre-crisis Ruth, and by the time we get into her head in the third book her character development is almost totally complete. And even then, a lot of what happens with her is weirdly undeveloped/offscreened. I like Laura, but I would trade a good 70% of the scenes of Laura being shy and ambivalent for some good in-depth looks inside Ruth's head.)
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/244583.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.
nextian's fault that I zoomed through a comfort reread of Pamela Dean's Secret Country books a week or so ago. I mean, not that I wasn't due for one anyway.
The thing about the Secret Country books, like most of Pamela Dean's books, is that they are hugely flawed and utterly self-indulgent in a way that makes them perfect for me. The basic plot follows five cousins who basically spend all their summers LARPing out a high fantasy plot they made up and have now created an obsessive amount of detail about. Then, of course, they find an actual secret portal to the fantasy land they made up where everyone thinks they're their own avatar characters - half of whom are totally unimportant to the plot, since the kids spent all their time running around playing five million NPCs. Naturally, this causes some problems which will ring hilariously familiar to anyone who has ever been in fandom or has done any kind of RP, ever. Observe:
PRINCESS LAURA: The prettiest, spunkiest, most outgoing, best dancer and horseback rider in the whole castle!
ACTUAL LAURA: Shy, introverted, and terrified of any kind of attention. Also terrified of horses. PROBLEMATIC.
PRINCESS ELLEN: Completely unimportant to the plot.
ACTUAL ELLEN: Would be having the time of her life running around having high fantasy adventures . . . if only Princess Ellen were not so boring and unimportant to the plot!
PRINCE PATRICK: Also completely unimportant to the plot.
ACTUAL PATRICK: Is actually fine with this, since it gives him more time to run around poking holes in fantasyland with a scientific empiricist stick, much to everyone else's exasperation.
LADY RUTH: Extremely mysterious, scheming and powerful sorcerous femme fatale. Engaged to at least two different people and rumored to be carrying on a not-so-secret affair with Prince Edward, who of course is now actually Ruth's baby cousin Ted.
ACTUAL RUTH: Sensible, long-suffering, and increasingly exasperated by everything Lady Ruth chooses to be.
PRINCE EDWARD: Due to over the next few weeks have his father murdered by his closest advisor, inherit the monarchy, lead a war, die, get resurrected by Lady Ruth, then fight a duel with the aforementioned closest advisor and kill him once he confesses his crime.
ACTUAL TED: Increasingly overwhelmed by feelings of WHAT THE HELL WERE WE THINKING, with a huge side order of HELP.
The plot that ensues has unicorns and dragons and magic swords and political scheming and tragic backstory and desperate duels, and poor Ted does actually at one point die and get resurrected, but honestly the real fun of the books is in watching the kids deal with the collision of fiction and reality (it's not really a spoiler to say that the Secret Country is both empirically real and made up by a bunch of kids, and not quite in the way one would expect) and how it feels to be an actor rather than an author - especially when you started out as a pretty Drosselmeyerian author. The pacing is kind of terrible and the plotting by the third book is completely all over the place and I can't even bring myself to care at all, because I enjoy so exactly the meta things that these books are doing and it is also just constantly hilarious to me to watch the kids flail their way around the IC/OOC divide.
(The main flaw that actually bothers me is that Ruth's story should be a central focus of the book, and it isn't. We're constantly told that Ruth is quiet and amiable and the sharper, more sarcastic personality that she starts to take on as Lady Ruth is startling to everyone, but we don't see anything of pre-crisis Ruth, and by the time we get into her head in the third book her character development is almost totally complete. And even then, a lot of what happens with her is weirdly undeveloped/offscreened. I like Laura, but I would trade a good 70% of the scenes of Laura being shy and ambivalent for some good in-depth looks inside Ruth's head.)
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/244583.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently
comments on Dreamwidth.