If the young angry punk Vlad of Taltos and Yendi era hadn’t grown and changed his thinking along with the experiences he lived through, then I seriously doubt he could have survived them, and certainly not without serious damage along the haunted, “you don’t know what I’ve seen” path. The very fact that middle-aged Vlad is a little more calm, a little more tired, and a little more willing to consider solutions other than those involving pointy bits, to me shows that Vlad’s flexibility of internal view is part of what helped him retain his resilience and basic character even throughout all the crazy changes and stuff he’s lived through (so far).

Thanks for sharing your thoughts and getting me to think about this, that was fun!

Lots of times it just comes down to the quality of writing: A good (or at least convincing) writer can make Evil Lord Evil work, even if it is a cliche. Someone not as good isn’t going to be able to make the character’s motivations convincing no matter what he does.

Frankly I’m upset that he hasn’t gotten more batshit insane and long horizon sublime as time has gone on. He has managed to retain his limited, cynical, streetwise mode of operation despite of some major experiences.

I grok that in the Dragerean world magic, sorcery, gods, odd temporal shifts, glowing imperial orbs, ghostly lands of the dead, huge seas of chaos magic are, well “normal” but..it seems that there are one set of characters – mostly Vlad’s circle of friends, who seem very comfortable traveling at the very edges of this world (“Sure, what? Walk the Paths of the Dead and return? pffft. Who hasn’t done that!”) and another set who know these things exist but have no real meaningful interaction with them – the average Teckla, Jhereg, Dragon foot soldier, Orca Merchant, etc…

To make it topical, there are those of us here in America who KNOW there are two wars being fought somewhere out there and we nod sagely to whatever talking head mouths an opinion similar to ours on it, and then there are those who are actually over there bleeding in them, and then there are those at a whole ‘nother level of experience managing them at a policy level.

Those that are involved in those things carry a different “internal logic” about them then those of us shopping at home.

I mean, Vlad just hasn’t developed that 100 yard stare vision, or even hints of it, and it bugs me that he HASN’T. I think he’d be more on the “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannuser Gate…”, especially when he mingles with and gets frustrated by the characters in that world that haven’t Walked the Paths of the Dead or carry their friends soul enshrined in a Great Weapon on their hip.

I expect Vlad to be a bit more shellshocked and arrogant, as primarily an easterner and street kid , albeit a talented one operating in some rarefied elements of a rarefied world. Being “grounded” by his grandfather is a piece, but it doesn’t seem influential enough to explain Vlad’s LACK of change in internal logic across the time span in the books.

Just an itch I’ve been having Steve as of late with the series. Still love it though…

Nasty. :-)

When a writer wins me over, at least within the context of a given story, I will go to any lengths in my own head to fill in plot holes, or come up with explanations about why something sloppy was actually deliberate.

Something like the hero worship in The Sun, the Moon and the Stars:
“Gee, I wonder why he did that”, hmm?

In that context, fiction containing villains or other actors who do BAD things that also does a fair job explaining why that character thinks it is okay or laudable to so act — well that takes me places in my skull I’d rather not go, but benefit from having gone anyway.

Morrolan, to name a character not at random, is both extraordinarily urbane and thoughtful, and at the same time sacrifices whole villages to verra. To paraphase Mel Brooks, It’s good to be an aristocrat. And aren’t we all secretly wishing, at least occasionally, that we could be one?

I can think of a Teckla’s account of his eviction from his mistress’ abandoned estate, and then of hearing the same events told by Paarfi, from Aerich’s perspective – Paarfi having clear biases in the Lyorn’s favor.

Vlad, of course, lets us see this process of self-justification most clearly.

And while I am never sure what is going on in Sethra Lavode’s head, it is plain that as often as she has taken a role adversarial to one party or another that she clearly has reasons for so doing that seem sufficient, even imperative, to her.

If I ever make a list of questions that it might be useful for a writer to ask about a character, I hope this would be included: “What does the character think is in his or her best interest?”

Interesting. I know it was just an example, but my impression was that Holden Caulfield’s mental illness was mostly being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind.

Certain stressors, though, contributed to his response to what he witnessed. Maybe without a family tragedy and a “murder by suicide” at his school, he would not have gone off on such a wild and dangerous bender. (Resulting in a very boring story that sheds very little light. Or, perhaps he would have been a matchstick on a mountain.) It was a repressed era, and even more so the culture around him; he was probably neurotic enough without the specific catalysts. But in trying to understand what he perceived, he somehow opened that eye, and ….

Sorry. It seems I’m getting pedantic. It’s a bit past noon on the west coast; normally I don’t get pedantic on the weekends until the evening.

And, to be honest, the bit with thematic multivalence was necessary. Sometimes we corner ourselves, and in this case, I just couldn’t lie to my own daughter to get out of it, and I simply couldn’t think fast enough to devise any other answer. (It was one of those “awkward questions” we always hear people refer to.) So I explained how a joke can do several things at once, and how you can string several jokes together to make one big joke, and so on. And she got that part, I think. We’ll see what the future brings, so to speak, as I could still come to regret this. It was certainly easier than trying to explain the multivalence of the particular example at hand; there were the individual jokes, the larger punch lines of the episode itself, and how those fit into the underlying caricatures and artistic themes of the series. And I knew the question was coming in that “someday” sense, but did nothing to forestall it.

I should probably return this thread to its regularly-scheduled broadcast. Thanks and apologies alike.