Okay, but how can you like woobies and not like Christopher? He is my favorite woobie!
(Also, I have mentioned this series on my lj before, but I think you might enjoy the Darkangel trilogy. Irrylath is my favorite Jerkass Woobie. Also, terraformed moon.)
Okay, but how can you like woobies and not like Christopher? He is my favorite woobie!
Huh. I never thought of him that way, just as a rather smug and self-satisfied figure of authority who needs to pay more attention to what his kids and wards are doing.
I like him as a teenager, though. He's still smug and self-satisfied, but it's so unwarranted that it's pretty damned funny.
(Also, I have mentioned this series on my lj before, but I think you might enjoy the Darkangel trilogy. Irrylath is my favorite Jerkass Woobie. Also, terraformed moon.)
I read those books ages ago, but I don't recall having any sympathy for Irrylath at all. Possibly because I read the middle one first.
I really . . . have no explanation for some of the things that Christopher does in Charmed Life,other than the unsatisfyingly meta one that it's more of a purely children's book than the other ones, and what adults do in children's books often doesn't make sense because many of the things adults do make no sense to children. I am very fond of Charmed Life in many ways, but I think DWJ definitely got better in her later books at having her characters do things for actual reasons rather than plot reasons.
I think of Christopher as a woobie mostly because of The Lives of Christopher Chant. Christopher's horrible childhood is a lot more subtly horrible than a lot of DWJ's charachers', but--he never talked to his father or saw his face until he was ten years old, despite living in the same house most of the time. His parents were separated and no one told him. His mother interacts with him occasionally, at unpredictable intervals, generally when she wants to use him to advance her social position; she certainly never tries to engage
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Huh. You're right, of course, though I think it's much too late for me to get that kind of emotional response to him now.
I think there are several reasons I never saw it that way. One is that it's so many years between my first reading of Lives of Christopher Chant (at age 9) and Charmed Life (at age 21) that I never quite manage to gel the two versions of Christopher together as one person - though of course Conrad's Fate helps a bit. And I think as an adult reader, I expected adults to be better people than I did as a kid, which made me judge Christopher a little more harshly
( ... )
Comments 6
(Also, I have mentioned this series on my lj before, but I think you might enjoy the Darkangel trilogy. Irrylath is my favorite Jerkass Woobie. Also, terraformed moon.)
Reply
Huh. I never thought of him that way, just as a rather smug and self-satisfied figure of authority who needs to pay more attention to what his kids and wards are doing.
I like him as a teenager, though. He's still smug and self-satisfied, but it's so unwarranted that it's pretty damned funny.
(Also, I have mentioned this series on my lj before, but I think you might enjoy the Darkangel trilogy. Irrylath is my favorite Jerkass Woobie. Also, terraformed moon.)
I read those books ages ago, but I don't recall having any sympathy for Irrylath at all. Possibly because I read the middle one first.
Reply
I think of Christopher as a woobie mostly because of The Lives of Christopher Chant. Christopher's horrible childhood is a lot more subtly horrible than a lot of DWJ's charachers', but--he never talked to his father or saw his face until he was ten years old, despite living in the same house most of the time. His parents were separated and no one told him. His mother interacts with him occasionally, at unpredictable intervals, generally when she wants to use him to advance her social position; she certainly never tries to engage ( ... )
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I think there are several reasons I never saw it that way. One is that it's so many years between my first reading of Lives of Christopher Chant (at age 9) and Charmed Life (at age 21) that I never quite manage to gel the two versions of Christopher together as one person - though of course Conrad's Fate helps a bit. And I think as an adult reader, I expected adults to be better people than I did as a kid, which made me judge Christopher a little more harshly ( ... )
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