Forum:Character Arc

I guess I'm just missing the days of the Better Board and its various uncles and cousins, but I wouldn't mind having a venue to discuss an aspect of Turtledove that's bothered me of late.

Why so few character arcs? HT writes multi-volume, multi-generational stories told through the perspective of more or less the same few people, and those people move around a lot and witness important events, but we don't often really learn anything about them. It feels like a wasted opportunity.

I'm leaving out standalones like MwIH, which had no character development to speak of except perhaps Diana McGraw deciding she didn't want to go back to being a suburban housewife after her fifteen minutes of fame were up. In TWTPE, the story started getting more interesting last year but the characters didn't. Based on the teaser of TBS, I could see us getting a bit of a glimpse into what makes Theo tick but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if we didn't, either.

TL-191 would seem to be the ultimate opportunity for intriguing character developments. Flora was by far the strongest, as moving from radical to respectably center-left, from opposition that barely has patience for the Constitution and would rather start a revolution to career politician insider, dove to hawk, and member of a party that's in power more often than it's out was great and was almost the only thing that was more interesting in SA than it was in GW. Otherwise, Featherston, the most important character for at least six out of the eleven books, was all in all pretty shallow. I enjoyed watching Sylvia grow more independent, but it always felt more like she was reacting to circumstances without gaining any new insight into herself. Lucien was fun, but more as a Quebecois everyman through whom we could chase his people's evolution from loyal but unenthusiastic Canadians to mildly resentful occupied people to skeptical about their new government to deciding that the new system, at the very least, was no worse than the old one. Any of his neighbors could have had the exact same arc with minimal changes. Pinkard gets credit for some Anakin Skywalker-esque moral corruption without the redemption in the end, but I never saw it; he just started out as a boring, mildly unlikeable character, got a bad break, allowed it to make him more and more bitter, and became an ideal candidate to buy what Jake was selling. Scipio's age, intelligence, and diversity of experience should have made him ideal for a strong character arc, but his development was minimal. Clarence Potter had what looks like a character arc in reverse: from observer in the story with feelings strong enough to drive him to make a game-changing decision, to status quo-supporting nonentity. Some, like Dowling, Morrell, and Hip, went through years and years of remaining essentially unchanged until TG, when all of a sudden their horror and/or outrage at population reduction turned them into something new, while most of the others, like Grimes and O'Doull and even ten-book lifers like Martin and Carsten, just seemed to be along for the ride. As for HFR characters who returned in subsequent books, TR was certainly a hugely important force in the first half of the series, but we got no insight into his character, and Custer just went from being young and insufferable to being old and insufferable.

Worldwar fares a little better, I guess, with Atvar moving from sneeringly arrogant, to paralyzed by his own anxieties for a bit as he realizes the situation is like nothing he'd ever imagined, to acclimating himself to it fairly quickly, to being on the defensive when he comes into contact with members of his own people who haven't had years and years to figure out why he made the compromises that he did, and eventually somewhat smug and superior as history validates all he'd told his fellow Lizards. Despite how serious the Race's situation is at the end of HB, he's seen too much to be very worried and is just gratified that everyone's finally realized that he did his best. The scenes with the hologram at the start of each book provided a wonderful opportunity to trace this arc step by step. Yeager had some growth, but it felt more like he was discovering who he'd been all along, and it was handled blandly, constantly subsumed in the sense of "Wow, I can't believe that a guy with my humble beginnings has risen so far and seen the things I've seen." Heinrich Jager's transformation was pretty good, as his loyalties bent and eventually broke as he realized how immoral his leaders really were, and Ussmak had a more or less parallel course, though in his case it was because the leaders who were unworthy of the faith he'd placed in them lost that faith through imprudence rather than immorality. On the topic of broken loyalties, Larssen had a situation similar to Pinkard's and it was handled much, much better. I liked Nesseref but was not impressed with her characterization. Russie started strong but fizzled, Anielewicz similar. Liu Han was like Sylvia though she started out a lot lower on the confidence scale and rose even higher, but was still more or less a one-trick pony. Most of the rest, meh.

Victor Radcliff had some interesting transformations, from all but singlehandedly winning a war for Britain to leading the revolutionary charge, and from indifferent to slavery, to a mild establishmentarian opposition as a result of his relationship with Blaise, to horror and anguish as he realizes his only son will be condemned to a life of shackles and whips. Alas, USA was too uneven to do as much with it all as it might have.

Not a ton of characterization in Derlavai, though I did like watching Ealstan and Vanai grow together and the Jelgavan guy developstronger and stronger political opinions. For the most part, though my favorite characters ended the story as they'd begun it, at least internally. And of course Detina had nothing, though that's not why I'd read it.

Shakespeare showed very little growth in RB and de Vega none at all. Granted, they only had one novel, and one year in the life, and they were pretty busy at the time.

In GotS Lee seemed to be on a bit of a journey though I think it was more like he had started off in a certain place and remained there throughout the story, and his refusal to shift in his principles led to the Rivington Men going from seeing him as an ally to seeing him as an enemy. Learning of how history remembers the Confederate cause seems to have rattled him but it's been so long since I read GotS that my recall is imperfect.

I'm not surprised that there's minimal characterization in books written in the last five or six years but HT used to pay much greater attention to detail, and it just seems odd that he's taken advantage of so few opportunities in this area. Turtle Fan 21:43, June 22, 2011 (UTC)