the blog i never update

Earlier this year, out of curiosity and to honour a lost friend, I reread a series that I enjoyed in my early teen years: the Sword of Truth books. I remembered them as being a bit ridiculous, but captivating, and I wanted to get up to the later books published after I was out of my fantasy "phase". Fortunately I'm an ebook reader, so between the Internet Archive and my local library I was able to get the entire main series for free. But rereading as an adult shocked and horrified me. Enough that I needed to really sit down and process my feelings. The more I searched for others' opinions online, the more baffled I was at the type of amused deprecation I found over novels that feel too genuinely, dangerously fascist to be casual reading for young people.

So I wrote three thousand words about it.

Let's get this our of the way: this isn't an unbridled hate post. I know if you are a fan of a series it's east to get defensive and shut your ears to genuine critical analysis because people mostly want to get internet clout making fun of stuff that isn't even a real issue. For example, a plot point that people love to raise when they call these books bad is the "evil chicken". But it lacks the context that this is supposed to be absurd in context. The evil being takes the form of a chicken and the characters struggle to believe it. It's written as silly, and the narrative itself is making a joke out of it by playing up the melodrama. It was... a chicken! Dun dun duuuun! Negative reviews that make these kinds of mistakes are easy for fans to write off as bandwagon haters who haven't actually read the series.

This post isn't about whether or not the writing is good - Goodkind was dyslexic, and admitted he never read fiction, but he still knows how to keep a page turning on par with other pulp action-writers like Susanna Clarke or Matthew Reilly, and he's good at using narrative POV to build tension, by misleading the reader or by giving them info the main character doesn't have. The prose is workhorse, though he begins to rely on repetition in descriptions in later novels. By claiming each book can stand alone, he also has to spend more and more time shoehorning in explanations of prior books' events. Ultimately I won't cast moral judgement on people who enjoy the way Goodkind writes.

Nor am I here to judge if you enjoy old fantasy that relies on problematic tropes. The damsel in distress, the white saviour complex, the abundance of rape... there is a baseline structural sexism and racism present in so much media from that time (but especially sci-fi/fantasy written by white dudes.) These days we interrogate these texts from feminist or racialized lenses and can see how the privileges of even authors and auteurs who were trying to step out from the restrictions of their race and sex (George R R Martin, for instance, has talked about how he wrote women "as people" because that's how he sees them; David Eddings (i know, i know) collaborated with his wife Leigh; both authors still have moments of non-diagetic misogyny because it's in the groundwater of the genre.) Unfortunately, what's wrong with the Sword of Truth series runs deeper and is more insidious.

What I want to talk about is the books' philosophy and values. Goodkind wrote these to try and teach people something he believed, and for a great deal of people - my young self included - the series changed how they viewed the world. On the surface, the Wizards Rules and Richard's hero's journey seem moral: these are books about doing good, thinking rationally, and overcoming authoritarian government, right?

(Padme Amidala concerned face meme) Right?

( Right? )