Abuse of parentheses

[mrissa]

Amber and Em have been and gone, and timprov was well enough to see Amber, albeit not well enough to get up and go see Em downstairs as well. (He knows Amber much, much better, since we lived in exile California at the same time, without anybody else from college around the Bay Area. We all miss the Amber and are working with the Emily to try to get her to move here.)

I have been on the phone trying to get things figured out for timprov and am still waiting for a call back. I am exhausted, though not particularly by the phone or Amber and Em. (I'm still trying to refer to them in that order, because in college it was always "EmmanAmber," because they are that kind of best friends, and then Em went and married Aaron, so now it's "EmmanAmb--err, Aaron." And I think putting Em second is the solution to this.) (gaaldine and I were a good deal more like Janet and Molly: close, but with distinct nomenclature throughout. And also we sometimes left out a third person without meaning to, freshman year, which is why I thought of Janet and Molly in the first place.) (I think this might make me Molly. This thought pleases me. I would cheerfully whack things with a stick if given the chance -- maybe with just a wee nap first.) (But then, so would gaaldine, so that really gets us nowhere, as distinguishing features go.)

Do you know what has been upsetting me lately? (Among the things I haven't mentioned, I mean. Except I think in a couple of e-mails.) The trope that pure hearts win the day. Bah. Bah, I tell you! It's a pernicious lie, and it's particularly common in books aimed at children, and it's even worse to tell children, because they have less experience to see that it's a lie. I was glad to see Terry Pratchett take it on with Tiffany in one of her books. The things I'm doing against it seem to all be more indirect and mostly for grown-ups. (And why am I writing for grown-ups anyway? Elephino. Because something broke my brain in that direction, don't know what.) The focus on the power of purity of heart and purity of love in the latest (sixth) Harry Potter book made me roll my eyes halfway out of their sockets. Love is a very powerful thing, but so is knowing what the hell you are doing.

Three things, then: any similar messages driving you disproportionately nuts? Any thoughts on pure hearts? And anyone who was powerfully affected by the deaths in the HP books: can you explain to me why they mattered to you in the context of the series? Why they were important and either surprising or powerful beyond need for a surprise? Because they did not hit me right at all, and I know they did hit some people in the solar plexus, and I'm trying to get a handle on why.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

"the scrawny nerd who doesn't see the light of day will suddenly become the savior of humanity through the use of technology he hasn't specialized in and has no practical experience creating."

It depends on what matters, the experience of the specific tech, or the modes of thought that let you pick it up.

One of the things I'm in the middle of writing has as a core element what happens when you take someone in their early twenties who is a rather good systems porgrammer with a sneaky turn of mind and who has also read quite a lot of secondary world fantasy, and drop them into the sort of secondary world that has a magic system. Which he promptly sets about trying to hack. Because there's not enough fiction out there where the magic Has Rules and people treat them with ways of thinking appropriate to "sets of rules" in general rather than to Magic. I hope this doesn't count as the sort of thing you find offputting, even if he has the sort of degree of connection to averting the threats facing all of humanity one expects from a principal chracter.

[songwind.livejournal.com]

No, in fact, I quite like that idea.

Unless your character's reading of secondary world fiction enables him to survive in near-waterless savanah despite never being of pavement other than while reading a book. :)

[songwind.livejournal.com]

Speaking of magic system with rules, I agree with you that there are too few presented.

I also feel that in many instances where the author seems to have attempted it, the rules thus presented often have extremely arbitrary division that don't make much sense, even internally. For example, the additive/subtractive magic idea in Sword of Truth or the law/chaos division in the Recluse novels by Modessit.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think there's too little magic with rules around, by any means; I like numinous magic, and I really don't like the kind of magic systems where you can feel the dice rolling in the background. I just seem to be drawn to writing more about magic with rules [ realist magicism, as papersky calls it ] than the other.