The Sine Wave of Writer Research (Scattered FR spoilers)

[teakay]

You know, I think I've pinpointed what bothers me off and on about Lisa Smedman's writing, namely her research. It's certainly not uniformly poor dreck that I could shamelessly point and laugh at. The thing is, it juxtaposes patches of "clearly did her homework" with patches of gaffe. The fluctuations of my figurative Accuracy Meter over the course of Sacrifice of the Widow would probably resemble a sine wave.

Take, for example, her incorporation of pieces of City of the Spider Queen material into Storm of the Dead. Karas, a minor NPC rogue/cleric of Vhaeraun in the module, became a main character. She put in generous references to other bits of the module such as his scarred face and the possible fate of the rest of the Hidden. But when it came to the priestesses of Kiaransalee in the same book she yanked a lot out of whole cloth. Where'd Irae T'sarran and her relatives get to? How about Larynda Telenna?

Also: The Vhaeraunites. There's the matter of the masks, of course - while just about every other source prior to this has depicted them with superhero-style domino masks, she went for masks on the lower part of the face - plus made their design half a plot point. She apparently looked up priestly titles - she actually used the term "Nightshadow" a lot more than any other authors I recall, and it's a legitimate enough term for a full priest. She also kindasorta explained Seyll's surname, which was nice. But then - "Silverflash." Fucking Silverflash. The proper name is Shadowflash. SHADOWFLASH. It's in Demihuman Deities, it's in Faiths and Pantheons, Silverflash is a completely counterintuitive name for a weapon of Vhaeraun, and I find it hard to believe that it was too much effort for someone along the line to check, but maybe I'm just A) anal and B) naive.

And then the Selvetargtlin of Sacrifice of the Widow. What a double-edged sword there. Generous and intriguing amounts of fluff for their first and last hurrah... some of which ended up blithely fluffing over prior canon. Selvetarm had aranea worshippers... but they live in Calimshan, worship him under the name of Zanassu, and otherwise appear to have little connection to drow besides sometimes looking like them. So why is one turning up to invade the Promenade? Blood-tipped braids are involved, and Dhairn has one... but previously they were depicted as more than one per head. There's this helpful color plate of the drow priests, including a priest of Selvetarm, in Demihuman Deities. It also has a priest of Vhaeraun. With a mask. ETA: Okay, on a reread, there are others described with multiple braids in a later passage. I'm glad I don't have so many readers otherwise I'd curl up and die of shame. But the thing about the aranea still stands. As does the bit below.

And then, and here's my pet peeve, there's the matter of Selvetarm's backstory. The BACKSTORY. Okay, no rewrites, but still - giant omitted chunks of backstory. Bye-bye, "batshit insane about Eilistraee and trying to win her approval, but was set up by Lolth whereupon he turned simply batshit." Now it's just "Vhaeraun's sprog, killed a demon and got corrupted, full stop." Which is true enough but has about as much accuracy as any soundbite. If I'd just picked up Sacrifice of the Widow without reading Demihuman Deities or Faiths and Pantheons, I might even have been okay with Eilistraee's reaction (or lack thereof) to his getting whacked. After all, she completely left out those aspects of his past with Eilistraee that made me sit up at the coda and go "Wait, you did what now? He's her grandson? How about he's your tanjing nephew you were once all fired-up about redeeming, you-"

I'm not such a rabid fangirl as to insist that Eilistraee absolutely should have rescued Selvetarm and cleaned him up and turned him shiny and then released him back into the wild as her number one fan. But I do think that there was a lot of potential missed in this omission, and it left this gigantic flapping loose end of character arc that now probably won't ever be tied off properly short of a miracle. The contrast to all the effort various Eilistraeens go through over Halisstra makes it stand out even more.

... Phew. I feel better.

Comments

[pukingtoreador.livejournal.com]

"Silverflash" sounds like the name of a really lame superhero.

[tobykikami.livejournal.com]

Vhaeraun does/did have some of the classic superhero schtick going on (half-mask and cape and all) but silver is very much Eilistraee's color. If it was originally called Silverflash and she called it Shadowflash that would be fairly understandable, but randomly changing it to Silverflash makes no sense.