We meet again, City of Bones, for the last time!

[seriousfic]

The first thing you should know about City of Bones is that although the book is long, there isn’t much meat on dem bones. There’s a very high ratio of exposition to shit-going down. There’s also very little resolution and an excess of world-building. As in, who cares how leprechauns work in your canon, get on with the story! They conspire to rob the book of its readability. There’s a perfectly fine light, even quotable work in there, but it’s buried pretty deep.

The bigger problem would be Jace, he of both “My parents are deeeead’ and ‘my dad was meeean’ pain. He’s very much your standard snarky badass, but there’s nothing else there. It's just Draco Malfoy reguritated, chapter and verse. The story even goes through some pretty major convolutions just to get him a confrontation with his "Lucius Malfoy."

Moreover, the trope isn’t so much played straight or subverted so much as it’s missed. Think of the real champion snarkers. Han Solo, Hudson, Hawkeye, Wolverine. They’re always sidekicks. Because if your claim to fame is pointing out flaws in the plan, you can’t be the one making the plan. The archetype works best when it’s played against a leader who’s idealistic, conservative, or just plain crazy… that way, the snarker voices the audience’s more uncharitable thoughts.

Make him the big damn hero and it’s just overpowering. That’s because the best humor pits the underdog against authority. Even black jokes go against the authority of political correctness and politeness. So if you have the big damn hero making cutting remarks, he’s not taking the piss out of the hoity-toity, he’s picking on people weaker than he is. Not only that, but Clare doesn’t give the character any flaws (someone literally says that his rudeness makes him sexy). He makes mocking comments, he’s the best at his athletic pastime, all the women and some of the boys want him… holy shit, he’s a jock!

Archetypes are like animals. If you take them out of their natural habitat, they have to adapt if they’re going to survive. I bet part of the appeal of Draco Malfoy is that he’s a Doylist underdog: he’s not one of the gang, he and Slytherin are picked on. So why is it that the target audience is meant to laugh when Simon is turned into a rat but cry foul when Draco becomes a ferret? Really, all the Shadowhunters (they're demon hunters… why don’t they just call themselves Demon Hunters? Is there some confusion there?) seem to disdain anyone who doesn’t kill monsters for a living. It makes you wonder why they go around saving people who irritate them so much.

Oh, and Simon is a geeky ‘mundane’ (NOT Muggle, mundane, they're spelled differently, see?) introduced to serve as a butt monkey for the cool kids. Even our heroine, his best friend, tosses him aside for her shiny magic friends. But he’s plucky, loyal, and reacts to the existence of monsters with ‘wow, cool’. Holy shit, he’s a Doctor Who companion. Then the nice guy turns out to be a Nice Guy. He’s ever so much in love with heroine Clary, you see, but he dated other girls as “practice.” Honey, no. That’s the kind of thing the Phantom of the Opera would do if he had a face. But it's okay, he turns into a werewolf in the second book.

Now, admittedly, all of this could make for some interesting story elements… wouldn’t it suck to work for someone who derided you because he thought it was funny?... but it never breaks out of the unexamined Buffy/Supernatural/Harry Potter mold. Most damning is that although it’s not technically plagiarizing, the tropes that make up the story have been assembled with as much care and poise as randomly inserting Blackadder lines into an unrelated narrative. I get the feeling that the demon hunters and unreliable mentors and fascist villains aren’t there because the author has anything to say, but just because those are things that you find in the genre. They’re what’s come before, therefore, they should be reiterated now. None of these tropes are particularly subverted or inspired or even well-written, they’re just reassembled in a slightly different configuration then we’ve seen before. Now, if you like the genre, that’s okay (there’s a reason horror fans can’t get enough of silent, slow-moving killers gorily murdering nubile teenagers). But it’s pretty damning for a first work.

Comments

[rann.livejournal.com]

>>There’s also very little resolution and an excess of world-building.

y helo thar Tales of MU.

You should give that one a try, and luckily you don't have to pay to read it since it's online and the only books are self-published. You may want to spend several days in solitude beforehand, however, as over the course of reading many, many, many chapters of zomgworldbuilding and zomgpersecution and zomgpitymeeeee the snark may build up to near toxic levels in your body.

But yes, this seems to be a habit of people that are more interested in "Sharing the world inside their head with the reader" than they are with, y'know, telling a fucking story. Or being entertaining. If I want sharing I'll go to a family-style restaurant, I would now like to be entertained.

>>Because if your claim to fame is pointing out flaws in the plan, you can’t be the one making the plan.
>>So if you have the big damn hero making cutting remarks, he’s not taking the piss out of the hoity-toity, he’s picking on people weaker than he is. Not only that, but Clare doesn’t give the character any flaws (someone literally says that his rudeness makes him sexy). He makes mocking comments, he’s the best at his athletic pastime, all the women and some of the boys want him… holy shit, he’s a jock

y helo thar Anita Blake.

>>I bet part of the appeal of Draco Malfoy is that he’s a Doylist underdog: he’s not one of the gang, he and Slytherin are picked on.

I know that at some points I almost wanted to like Draco just because Rowling was trying so fucking hard to make him, and everyone that had ever so much as looked at Slytherin House, unlikeable. It was like she was pounding that point home so much that your brain wanted to rebel, because he went from being just kind of bratty and yeah, kind of an underdog outsider, to Blond Hitler Jr. It almost invokes the same sort of sympathy you have for an actor giving an earnest performance and doing his best in a really shitty movie.

(The waffling around didn't help, where Rowling couldn't make up her mind whether Slytherin was just another house with its own good points and Slytherins were Real People With Real Feelings and everyone just needed to get along, or if being sorted into Slytherin meant the Sorting Hat put a secret invisible swastika on your forehead because you were already irrevocably evil.)

>>Really, all the Shadowhunters (they're demon hunters… why don’t they just call themselves Demon Hunters? Is there some confusion there?) seem to disdain anyone who doesn’t kill monsters for a living. It makes you wonder why they go around saving people who irritate them so much.

y helo thar Brotherhood of Steel and Outcasts.

>>Oh, and Simon is a geeky ‘mundane’ (NOT Muggle, mundane, they're spelled differently, see?)

y helo thar Xanth.

>>But it's okay, he turns into a werewolf in the second book.

Y HELO THAR TWILIGHT.

(Seriously, did I even need to point that one out?)

>>I get the feeling that the demon hunters and unreliable mentors and fascist villains aren’t there because the author has anything to say, but just because those are things that you find in the genre.

Indeed and I say good day to you, Left Behind.

[rann.livejournal.com]

Which I now consider that you may in fact have been making a Twilight joke so I really didn't need to point that out...

[iteari.livejournal.com]

Jace and Clary were the most annoying out of the whole cast; naturally, this made me want Simon to wave a middle finger at them all and walk off---and that didn't seem to happen anytime soon, which is a shame, because that would have been the only worthwhile thing I would find in that book.