Epicness vs. Emotional Investment

[sunnyskywalker]

I'm a few of hundred pages into Guy Gavriel Kay's River of Stars, and I'm finally starting to feel like the characters might be people and that I might care what happens to them. The plot has also started to pick up, and I'm a little more invested in seeing how it all plays out. (I expect tragedy, of course, but it's all about how they get there.)

Comments

[4thofeleven]

It had not occurred to me in those terms, but yes, it does seem like my interest in ASoIaF was pretty much tied directly to the characters introduced early on. There was a nice chain of characters going on early on, where you get introduced to the Starks, then there’s chapters from Jon’s point of view introducing Tyrion, and then the Lannister plots being introduced through him. Then things started falling apart, until you end up with messes like the Dornish plot, where it’s basically a bunch of people we’ve got no reason to care about interact with a bunch of characters who were never properly introduced.

I think you can get away with the sprawling epic with lots of viewpoints that aren’t necessarily connected - Harry Turtledove does it a fair bit in his alternate history novels -but it does mean the plot has to carry a lot more of the weight because readers aren’t invested in individual characters anymore. Doesn’t work so well if your focus is on internal politicking, which has to be about the personalities involved.

[sunnyskywalker]

Especially doesn't work so well if most of the politicking is conveyed through summary recaps of stuff you never got to see.

Part of the problem might actually be--and how often do you say this about epics--that it isn't quite long enough. He tried to do a hugely epic thing in a single volume, which meant skipping over years at a time and summarizing all the character development that happened during those skips. And it wasn't about a convoluted or surprising plot, or I didn't find it so, and seemed to be more about characters and destiny and the meaning of empire and stuff like that. So it really suffered from skipping half the character development.