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You know what I love in a story? (Well, one of many things anyway.) When the good guys are wrong. Not in the sense of making a tragic mistake, or succumbing to temptation so they have something to angst about later, but ordinary everyday wrong. Being good, or a basically decent person =/= perfect rightness.
The last Earthsea book, the newest one? Finally did something about the horrible, horrible afterlife we're shown in The Farthest Shore. I mean, if you die and go to a dry dusty land where nothing grows and everything is grey and nobody knows or speaks to each other? I would think you'd gone to hell, honestly. And yet that's just. What death is for them? No. No no no no.
I loved Lebannen so much then. It seemed so obvious that someday, he would Do Something about this. How I did not know, given that you need sorcery to get there and he isn't one, but. He was at least decently upset.
And then Tehanu, and that question of dragons which ends in such an... unresolved quality.
Then we have The Other Wind. In which the dragons come looking to take back territory that humans stole from them, and it turns out the distant barbarian Kargs were right about the Hardic people being horrible evil sorcerors all along! In a sense.
Because all the peoples of the world, human and dragon alike, have legends of the time when humans and dragons were one people and then split. But the truth of why, and how, had been lost all the time. The deal was this: dragons fly, and go free of all good and evil, all possessions and craft and the infinity complications thereof. The one thing they keep is the Language of the Making. They are the language
Humans get: all the things! All the possessions and complications, and as the dragons put it 'the yoke of good and evil'. (I utterly adore these dragons, btw.) But they had to give up the Language of the Making.
The Kargs kept that bargain, and at first so did the Hardics - and then two very powerful sorcerors got the idea that they would learn the Language like they'd do any human one, and made a writing system where there had never been one before.
Because, you see, they'd figured out that dragons are not exactly mortal as humans are - part of their freedom is that they can fly from the living realms to the 'west beyond the west' and possibly (speculation from one of the Roke wizards, towards the end) through time. Jealously isn't even the word for what followed - I'd use blasphemy.
Because seriously, that horrible afterlife? Is exactly what the Kargs said, what Arha/Tenar was told as a child - when the Hardic die, their souls are not reincarnated but cursed to wander in that place. And this is because the people who rediscovered the Language used it to tear into the afterlife, into that sacred place which was the dragons' realm, and seal off a bit for themselves and their descendants, and cast a ring of spells around the archipelago so that everyone born there who got a true name in the Language would go there after death.
So the Kargs get reincarnation, and the dragons get the Language, and the terrible sorcery-using Hardic (who are also perfectly decent interesting wonderful people) get to go to a grey hell when they die because distant ancestors were oathbreaking jackasses.
Clearly, this needed to be stopped. And it is, in the most wonderful manner, and I like it even better for the fact that it wasn't even primarily Lebannen who undoes this horror, but that he as king is able to bring people together and at the crucial moment volunteers to help. <3
And I just. I love that they were wrong, and still good people. I love that they realize its wrong and want to do something about it, and that the one guy who feels his privilege is being threatened and tries to get shirty about it is slapped down by Lebannen.
Off this topic entirely, I love the Karg princess who gets involved in all this. I love Lebannen himself trying to be shirty about being forced into a marriage and then meeting her for the first time and she can barely speak his language and yet such is the force of her presence that it's like a slap in the face - that he feels he cannot understand and yet knows he has been in the presence of courage.
So much squee. :D
The last Earthsea book, the newest one? Finally did something about the horrible, horrible afterlife we're shown in The Farthest Shore. I mean, if you die and go to a dry dusty land where nothing grows and everything is grey and nobody knows or speaks to each other? I would think you'd gone to hell, honestly. And yet that's just. What death is for them? No. No no no no.
I loved Lebannen so much then. It seemed so obvious that someday, he would Do Something about this. How I did not know, given that you need sorcery to get there and he isn't one, but. He was at least decently upset.
And then Tehanu, and that question of dragons which ends in such an... unresolved quality.
Then we have The Other Wind. In which the dragons come looking to take back territory that humans stole from them, and it turns out the distant barbarian Kargs were right about the Hardic people being horrible evil sorcerors all along! In a sense.
Because all the peoples of the world, human and dragon alike, have legends of the time when humans and dragons were one people and then split. But the truth of why, and how, had been lost all the time. The deal was this: dragons fly, and go free of all good and evil, all possessions and craft and the infinity complications thereof. The one thing they keep is the Language of the Making. They are the language
Humans get: all the things! All the possessions and complications, and as the dragons put it 'the yoke of good and evil'. (I utterly adore these dragons, btw.) But they had to give up the Language of the Making.
The Kargs kept that bargain, and at first so did the Hardics - and then two very powerful sorcerors got the idea that they would learn the Language like they'd do any human one, and made a writing system where there had never been one before.
Because, you see, they'd figured out that dragons are not exactly mortal as humans are - part of their freedom is that they can fly from the living realms to the 'west beyond the west' and possibly (speculation from one of the Roke wizards, towards the end) through time. Jealously isn't even the word for what followed - I'd use blasphemy.
Because seriously, that horrible afterlife? Is exactly what the Kargs said, what Arha/Tenar was told as a child - when the Hardic die, their souls are not reincarnated but cursed to wander in that place. And this is because the people who rediscovered the Language used it to tear into the afterlife, into that sacred place which was the dragons' realm, and seal off a bit for themselves and their descendants, and cast a ring of spells around the archipelago so that everyone born there who got a true name in the Language would go there after death.
So the Kargs get reincarnation, and the dragons get the Language, and the terrible sorcery-using Hardic (who are also perfectly decent interesting wonderful people) get to go to a grey hell when they die because distant ancestors were oathbreaking jackasses.
Clearly, this needed to be stopped. And it is, in the most wonderful manner, and I like it even better for the fact that it wasn't even primarily Lebannen who undoes this horror, but that he as king is able to bring people together and at the crucial moment volunteers to help. <3
And I just. I love that they were wrong, and still good people. I love that they realize its wrong and want to do something about it, and that the one guy who feels his privilege is being threatened and tries to get shirty about it is slapped down by Lebannen.
Off this topic entirely, I love the Karg princess who gets involved in all this. I love Lebannen himself trying to be shirty about being forced into a marriage and then meeting her for the first time and she can barely speak his language and yet such is the force of her presence that it's like a slap in the face - that he feels he cannot understand and yet knows he has been in the presence of courage.
So much squee. :D