#Crysania's Argument with the Kingpriest | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nightbloomwitch · 2 years

Text

All the Wizards I've Loved Before: Inspirations for the Darkling - Dragonlance Legends: Time of the Twins - Book 2, Chapters 1-3

<--- Previous post

I’ve pulled it together now, sorry about the brief detour. Obviously we’ll revisit those points about immortality properly when we cover the Vampire Chronicles later on.

Yes I did see the news about the DitW graphic novel and I cheered. It’s so funny to me that this character Leigh hates so much will always be the one thing the series is known for.

I can't wait to see how she tries to convince us not to care about ethnic persecution and attempted child murder this time.

"cool motive, still murder", remember?

Also can’t wait for the drama that ensues if the comic adds new information or changes anything at all from the prose version. If you’ve read The Dark Tower comics, then you know exactly how wrong comic adaptations can go for tragic bad wizard backstories. Do ur worst Leigh, you will never fuck over bad wizard defenders as violently as Robin Furth did.

Every day of my life I praise Gan that Furth herself confirmed the comics aren’t canon, thus sparing me from an eternity of losing arguments with Kingverse nerds.

I’m not even going to attempt to explain all the time-travel quackery in this series until at least the second book, and even then only if I absolutely can’t avoid it.

Suffice to say for now that Caramon, Tas and Crysania have been sent over 300 years into the past, to the last days before the Cataclysm – the apocalyptic event that devastated the geography of Ansalon and signaled the departure of the gods from Krynn until their eventual return in Chronicles. Presumably Raistlin is around here somewhere as well, since he needs to get to Crysania once she’s been woken up.

Krynn was a different world 300 years ago, and in fact it was quite a bit more like Ravka, except that the Shadow Fold equivalent event that resulted in the near-destruction of the world was caused not by an overwhelming swathe of darkness, but by a ruinous blaze of light.

At that time, the most powerful city-state in the world was the shining city of Istar, capital of the Empire and seat of the Kingpriest, who was both the head of state and the supreme priest of the church of Paladine.

The Cataclysm was the gods’ retribution against the Kingpriest, who sought to purge the world of the creatures and philosophies of Evil, and even to become a god himself. The gods sent him many warnings that his ambition threatened to destroy the Doctrine of Balance that preserves the existence of all life on Krynn, however the Kingpriest and his followers refused to heed the omens, and so the gods sent ‘a burning mountain’ from the heavens (a meteor) to destroy Istar.

The true clerics – those who had genuine faith in the gods, rather than the Kingpriest – were taken directly to the afterlife before the devastation began. This is why Crysania had to be sent back in time – the only one with the power to restore her soul to her body is a true cleric in direct communication with Paladine.

However, as long as she’s alive, there’s a danger that Raistlin will convince her to help him open the Door to Darkness, and so Par-Salian’s true intention is for Crysania to be taken in the rapture along with the other clerics, where she will be beyond Raistlin’s reach forever, and, since the only other true cleric in the present time is Elistan, who is on his deathbed and can be trusted never to give in to Raistlin anyway, the mages can stop him without needing to fight him directly.

---

The narrator for Chapter 1 is Denubis, one of the lower-ranked clerics of Istar.

“This time the cleric looked more closely into the shadows formed by the huge marble columns supporting the gilded ceiling. A darker shadow, a patch of blackness within the darkness was now discernible. Denubis checked an exclamation of irritation. Suppressing the second shudder that swept over his body, he halted in his course and moved slowly over to the figure that stood in the shadows, knowing that the figure would never move out of the shadows to meet him. It was not that light was harmful to the one who awaited Denubis, as light is harmful to some of the creatures of darkness. In fact, Denubis wondered if anything on the face of this world could be harmful to this man. No, it was simply that he preferred shadows. Theatrics, Denubis thought sarcastically.

“You called me, Dark One?” Denubis asked in a voice he tried hard to make sound pleasant.

Ooh, who could this be?! Let’s jump ahead a few chapters and get a really good look:

"Standing on the fringes of the crowd was a black-robed figure. He stood alone. Indeed, there was even a wide, empty circle around him. None in the crowd came near him. Many made detours, going out of their way to avoid coming close to him. No one spoke to him, but all were aware of his presence. Those near him, who had been talking animatedly, fell into uncomfortable silence, casting nervous glances his direction.

The man’s robes were a deep black, without ornamentation. No silver thread glittered on his sleeves, no border surrounded the black hood he wore pulled low over his face. He carried no staff, no familiar walked by his side. Let other mages wear runes of warding and protection, let other mages carry staves of power or have animals do their bidding. This man needed none. His power sprang from within – so great, it had spanned the centuries, spanned even planes of existence. It could be felt, it shimmered around him like the heat from the smith’s furnace.

He was tall and well-built, the black robes fell from shoulders that were slender but muscular. His white hands – the only parts of his body that were visible – were strong and delicate and supple. Though so old that few on Krynn could venture even to guess his age, he had the body of one young and strong. Dark rumours told how he used his magic arts to overcome the debilities of age.

And so he stood alone, as if a black sun had been dropped into the courtyard. Not even the glitter of his eyes could be seen within the dark depths of his hood.

“Who’s that?” Tas asked a fellow prisoner conversationally, nodding at the black-robed figure.

“Don’t you know?” the prisoner said nervously, as if reluctant to reply.

“I’m from out of town,” Tas apologised.

“Why, that’s the Dark One – Fistandantilus. You’ve heard of him, I suppose?”

“Yes.” Tas said, glancing at Caramon as much as to say I told you so! “We’ve heard of him.”

The resounding hush that accompanies Fistandantilus everywhere he goes is reminiscent of people’s reactions to the Darkling, particularly in the early scenes in S&B (the tent scene and the presentation to the King).

S&B is very thin on physical descriptions, but I think of all the novels and films we’re going to go through, the above passage is the closest to all the physical descriptors given of the Darkling across the series. Along the same lines as the contrasting descriptions of hands given in the Chapter 11 post, Mal is described as “broad” a couple of times, whereas the Darkling is “lean” in S&B and “all lean muscle” in The Tailor, and in WWSF he’s almost androgynous with a “slender-reed build”.

The other details about power great enough to span centuries need no explanation, though of course it’s important to note that Fistandantilus has attained his greatly elongated lifespan through dark magic rather than having been born immortal, and the implications of this are explained further in the below sections. Unlike the Darkling, he feels no need to invent ridiculous cover stories about untimely deaths and secret heirs, but instead wears his perpetual youth as a badge of his absolute mastery of the dark arts.

(Note from my inner editor: This passage is nonsense because how are we able to see such detail of what his body looks like inside these voluminous robes. Cut it out).

---

Dark One

Is a bad wizard even worthy of his black robes if he doesn’t have at least three different names and titles?

Leigh doesn’t think so, and neither do most of the writers on our list. My word count is going to explode wonderfully once we get to the Kingverse and I undertake the tortuous but fascinating labour of laying out and explaining each one of the legion of titles for the Dark Man.

For future reference, the full list of the Darkling’s titles is:

The Darkling

The Black Heretic

The Shadow King (in R&R prologue)

The Starless Saint, the Starless One, The Saint With No Stars (in The Lives of Saints)

His past pseudonyms are given as:

Leonid (the first Darkling), Staski, Kiril, Kirigan, Anton, Eryk (in RoW)

Eryk, Arkady, Iosef, Stasik, Kirill (in DitW)

Raistlin is a Hero of the Lance (yes, really, a hero), and the Master of Past and Present (not as good as it sounds, I only call him this when I’m making fun of him), but oddly enough it’s Fistandantilus’ title of ‘the Dark One’ that was semi-appropriated for TGV.

Where the title ‘Darkling’ originally comes from is something that, surprisingly, Leigh never seems to have been asked about, even after all the fuss and bother about changing it into a ‘slur’ on the show.

Dr Johnson’s dictionary defined ‘darkling’ as:

“a participle, as it seems, from darkle, which yet I have never found. Being in the dark, being without light: a word merely poetical.”

‘Poetical’ is the key, here. Historically, the word appears to have been used only in poetry, and was so rare that even Johnson couldn’t find evidence to speculate on the etymology of it. The only pre-20th century prose usage I can find is from Coleridge, who was, of course, a poet.

Like so many words, the earliest recorded use of the word ‘darkling’ is in Shakespeare, not as a noun but as an adverb meaning ‘in the dark’ or ‘in a dark way’. Shakespeare used it three times – Act 2, Scene 2 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 1, Scene 4 of King Lear, and most interestingly:

CLEOPATRA: O sun,

Burn the great sphere thou mov’st in. Darkling stand

The varying shore o’ the world!

Act 4, Scene 15, Antony and Cleopatra (c. 1607)

In modern English this line, from Cleopatra upon seeing Antony’s dead body, might be rendered as, “O Sun, burn away your orbit. Let all the shores of the world stand in darkness!”

The image of the sun breaking free of its orbit and burning out relates very well to Alina’s powers burning out and leaving her ‘orbit’ by being transferred to the otkazat'sya, as Mal’s corpse lies nearby.

As for the ‘shores of the world’, the other appearance of ‘darkling’ I want to draw specific attention to is Matthew Arnold’s 1867 poem Dover Beach:

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

The whole of Dover Beach connects incredibly well with TGT and I intend to return to it in full in the eventual Shadow Fold post.

Here’s another good one:

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

- Lord Byron, Darkness (1816)

According to Leigh’s 18 May 2012 blog post for Pub(lishing) Crawl, The Darkling was her original working title for S&B, but she thought it was too similar to Kristin Cashore’s Graceling, and she even considered changing the character’s name.

The other potential title she seemed to like the most, saying she was “smitten” with it, was The Black Shore, and I wonder whether she loved that title so much because it evokes both Shakespeare and Arnold’s poem.

Presumably at some point ‘darkling’ became a noun meaning ‘creature of darkness’, and I have very occasionally seen it used that way in other places, but if there’s any evidence of the transition, I can’t find it.

The only thing that ties the word ‘darkling’ directly to any of the other wizards on our list is this description of the Ageless Stranger in Book 5, Chapter 7 of The Gunslinger:

“He darkles. He tincts. He is in all times.”

This description recurs a few times in The Dark Tower (series) in relation to different characters. As for where Stephen King got it from, who knows. What does it mean? Unlike the Stranger, I only have so many hours, so we’ll have to come back to it later, along with the question of why wizards always seem to have so many names.

---

Fistantandilus was vaguely alluded to in Chronicles, but this is the first time in the series that he’s appeared in person and so the narration goes out of its way to confirm that he is, at this specific time, a human (hence why light does not harm him).

The reason I point this out is because it will become relevant Later. The D&D alignment system which dictates the actions characters of various religions and species are and aren’t permitted to take against other characters, far from strangling the story, is actually an extraordinarily good device for keeping the writers honest. There are no moral double standards in favour of the heroes; everyone must act in accordance with their alignment or face the consequences.. Switching alignments is possible,but it’s a momentous occasion when it happens, since it often results in in permanent excommunication from family, friends, and socio-political groups.

Although Fistandantilus is human for now, Dragonlance doesn’t intend for the reader to consider him as a human most of the time.

Fistandantilus is the type of character I refer to as an ‘Outsider’. In this specific genre of psychological metaphor stories about epic battles between light and darkness, where light is personified in an ‘ego’ character and darkness in a ‘shadow’ character, due to the requirement that the ego and shadow be ‘integrated’ or reconciled in the end in order for psychological healing (outwardly manifested as world saving and world healing) to take place, the ego and shadow characters are not ‘hero’ and ‘villain’ but rather they are both protagonists who antagonise one another with opposing moral codes, until they must put aside their differences and combine their strengths in order to defeat the true villain who is endangering the world.

The Outsider is not always physically powerful in his own right (and in fact usually isn’t, since the majority of the story is focused on the rivalry of the ego and shadow characters), but may be a character who lurks in the background and tempts, corrupts or coerces other characters into carrying out his will. Since the ‘shadow’ character embodies humanity’s ‘dark’ or negative qualities such as selfishness, jealousy and fear, it’s the shadow character who is more vulnerable to the Outsider’s manipulation. In some cases, the Outsider need not even be present in the story, and might be a villain who was already defeated, but it’s the lingering effects of the trauma inflicted by the Outsider that must be overcome.

In SFF it’s common for the Outsider to be non-human, or a human who has willingly surrendered their humanity, which exempts the reader from any need to sympathise with them, and exempts the characters from needing to abide by any in-universe moral standards regarding the treatment of humans. This is useful in D&D settings where committing ‘murder’ of any sentient being is considered to be the worst sin, because killing an undead isn’t counted as murder.

Although he’s technically alive in the past, as we heard in the previous chapters, Fistandantilus learned magic that allowed him to escape from death and bind his soul to the Tower of High Sorcery until he could claim a new vessel for it. Mortality is one of the defining traits of humanity on Krynn, and trying to extend one’s natural lifespan is a grave sin, because it’s an act in defiance of the design of humans as they were created by the god Gilean at the beginning of time. Thus, there’s a clearly defined and indisputable justification in Dragonlance for why humans trying to become immortal is in violation of the laws of nature. When he used magic to extend his mortal lifespan, and later became a spirit and tried to claim another body, Fistandantilus lost the ‘right’ to be treated as a human, both by the other characters in the story and by the reader.

This ego/shadow/Outsider plot structure is the structure of Legends. Fistandantilus in his original lifetime was a rogue operator – a mysterious but legendarily evil figure who had no known origin, no allegiances, no weaknesses – and the Black Robes of the present day have no desire to see him return. It’s the possibility of Fistandantilus’ return by his possession of Raistlin that convinces Ladonna to go along with Par-Salian’s time travel plan.

Raistlin is not an Outsider. He’s a human, from the same hometown as most of the other heroes; he went to school; he did mercenary work with his brother. As much as he likes to pretend otherwise, he has friends and family who care about him. Until the events of Chronicles, his life wasn’t remarkably different from anybody else’s (Krynn being full to bursting with adventuresome types). Raistlin is the ‘shadow’ character in the possession of the Outsider, and so the goal of the story is not to defeat him, but for the ‘ego’ characters (Caramon and Crysania) to redeem him by breaking him away from Fistandantilus’ malevolent influence, and preventing him from sacrificing his own humanity in his attempt to become a god.

This is a plot structure we’re going to see several more times, in both its most simple and most complicated forms in the Stephen King novels, and in the Vampire Chronicles as well, where Lestat and his allies who try to exist by human(ish) standards are often pitted against the really evil vampires and demons and so on.

TGT seems to be attempting something along these lines but it’s very muddled because there’s a character missing. Alina is the ‘ego’ and the Darkling is the ‘shadow’, that’s straightforward enough, but the Darkling is also the Outsider.

As we said above, the ego and shadow characters are usually both humans, but the Outsider is usually a non-human so it can be destroyed without breaking the moral bounds of the story. If anything, it seems that Alina is the ‘ego’ and Aleksander (being the ‘human’ aspect of the Darkling) is the ‘shadow’, with his persona as the Darkling being the Outsider (representing the use of merzost that corrupted him) but ‘Aleksander’ can’t be separated or redeemed away from the Darkling, due to the story’s insistence that use of merzost for any reason is unavoidably and irreversibly corrosive to one’s humanity. According to the end of R&R, Aleksander’s humanity was worth mourning, but it wasn’t worth saving, and in RoW Alina seems to no longer care about Aleksander at all.

There’s an odd turn in the sequel books where the Darkling’s humanity is no longer represented by Aleksander but rather by Yuri, but I’ll elaborate on that in a future post.

---

“Why does the Kingpriest keep him around the court? Why not send him away, as the others were banished?”

He said this to himself, of course, because – deep within his soul – Denubis knew the answer. This one was too dangerous, too powerful. This one was not like the others. The Kingpriest kept him as a man keeps a ferocious dog to protect his house; he knows the dog will attack when ordered, but he must constantly make certain that the dog’s leash is secure. If the leash ever broke, the animal would go for his throat.”

Ah, this sounds familiar. I’m sure it’s coincidence, but I like the way the dog metaphor relates back to all the other dog/wolf metaphors listed in the Chapter 7 post.

The ‘sinister court mage’ character type in modern fiction probably goes back to tales of John Dee in the court of Elizabeth I (who was possibly the inspiration for Spenser’s Archimago and/or Busirane in The Faerie Queene, and Shakespeare’s Prospero in The Tempest), as well as Marlowe’s Dr. Faust in the court of Charles V, with some later influence from the assorted evil viziers (or Wazirs) from Sir Richard F. Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights. Of course, the most famous Slavic ‘court mage’ was the rogue monk Grigori Rasputin, whose historical life shares a handful of superficial similarities with the Darkling’s, but instead Rasputin was primarily the inspiration for the Apparat:

I also love that you've got a religious mystic, an adviser to the royal family who's one of the more sympathetic figures at court. Are you trying to rehabilitate Rasputin?

I wanted to play with the idea...that when you abdicate power, when you give it to someone else, bad things happen. It doesn't matter if you give it to somebody good or somebody bad. The easy thing is with great power comes great responsibility. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there are a lot of ways to abdicate power. You can hide power, you can delegate it...One of the appeals of Rasputin is he has the answers. One of the appeals of the Darkling is he has the answers. These people turn to Alina because they want her to have the answers. It's a very compelling thing to look to someone else to lead. And I wouldn't say that I was trying in any way to rehabilitate Rasputin, who, frankly, given how hard it was to kill him, I wouldn't want to bring him back. But the Apparat is meant to evoke a lot of our suspicions and fears about the particular character. People who don't know anything about Russian history know that name.

- The Atlantic, 20 June 2012

The Darkling’s political meddling has the most in common with Flagg’s performance in Eyes of the Dragon, so we’ll defer an in-depth discussion of the trope to that book.

“The doors swung open, emitting a glorious light. His time of audience had come.

The Hall of Audience first gave those who came here a sense of their own meekness and humility. This was the heart of goodness. Here was represented the power and glory of the church. The doors opened onto a huge circular room with a floor of polished white granite. The floor continued upward to form the walls into the petals of a gigantic rose, soaring skyward to support a great dome. The dome itself was of frosted crystal that absorbed the glow of the sun and moons. Their radiance filled every part of the room.”

Resemblant of the palace of Istar is the bright opulence of Ravka’s Grand Palace:

“...we were climbing the white marble steps to the Grand Palace. As we moved through a spacious entry hall into a long corridor lined with mirrors and ornamented in gold, I though how different this place was from the Little Palace. Everywhere I looked, I saw marble and gold, soaring walls of white and palest blue, gleaming chandeliers, liveried footmen, polished parquet floors laid out in elaborate geometric designs.”

The point of including Fistandantilus in the Kingpriest’s court is to once again emphasise Dragonlance’s philosophy of balance between light and dark. The Kingpriest is the world’s most powerful user of light magic, and Fistandantilus is the only one who can balance him with powers of darkness. It’s once Fistandantilus disappears from the court that the final days begin, because then the Kingpriest’s path on his quest for godhood is unobstructed.

I think TGT is trying to take this approach to the Darkling’s presence in Ravka’s court, but it’s not communicated well because the Darkling is the primary villain, whilst the Lanstovs are an impotent secondary distraction, and so much of the story’s moralising focuses on scolding Alina and the Darkling for using their magical powers. In a way, the King and the Darkling do keep one another in check – the King (with the support of the otkazat'sya peasantry) and the First Army prevents the Darkling from just taking over the country himself, whilst the Darkling prevents the nobility and the church from carrying out pogroms on the Grisha population.

The design of the Grand Palace is contrasted with that of the Little Palace, which is built of dark wood. The diamond-encrusted Grand Palace is presumably supposed to indicate the unfeeling ignorance of the nobility, but the Little Palace with its painstakingly carved wood paneling and mother-of-pearl-inlaid-everything is not very much less grandiose, merely a bit more naturalistic, and the detachment of the Grisha from the common people is also drawn attention to through the Darkling’s pantomime insistence on peasant-inspired food and clothing.

In Legends, the Kingpriest and Fistandantilus are both equally bad – one is trying to rule the world by becoming the supreme god of Good, the other by trying to become the supreme god of Evil, and for either of them to succeed will cause the end of existence – whilst both must be removed personally, the story’s ultimate solution in the end is not to eliminate the church or the wizards or the powers of light and darkness, but to ensure that the balance between them is maintained by teaching people on both sides to be good and to love and respect one another.

In TGT, the King and the Darkling are both equally(?) bad, but the King is villainous mostly on a personal scale – his primary crime being his assault of Genya, with the poverty of the peasants being as much a consequence of the centuries of invasions by other countries as much as anything internal to Ravka – whereas the Darkling has world-ruling ambitions which are couched in similar terms to godhood in Dragonlance. The two are not equals in ambition or competence, and so the Darkling is made out to be the more credible and sinister threat. Both the King and the Darkling must be removed personally in the end as well, but the conclusion of TGT doesn’t come out the same as Legends, because of TGT’s stances that darkness is evil and must be purged, and that an excess of Grisha power renders one inhuman and unfit to rule (until RoW, apparently).

There’s a lot of story to go yet, so we’ll wait until the end of Legends to consider the differences between the conclusions in proper detail.

---

“You mentioned the Dark One. What do you know of him? I mean, why is he here? He-- he frightens me.”

…

“Who knows anything of the ways of magic-users,” he answered, “except that their ways are not our ways, nor yet the ways of the gods. It was for that reason the Kingpriest felt compelled to rid Ansalon of them, as much as was possible. Now they are holed up in their one remaining Tower of High Sorcery in that cast-off Forest of Wayreth. Soon, even that will disappear as their numbers dwindle, since we have closed the schools. You heard about the cursing of the Tower at Palanthas?”

…

“That terrible incident!” Quarath frowned. “It just goes to show you how the gods have cursed these wizards, driving that one soul to such madness that he impaled himself upon the gates, bringing down the wrath of the gods and sealing the Tower forever, we suppose. But, what were we discussing?”

“Fistandantilus,” Denubis murmured, sorry he had brought it up.

…

Quarath raised his feathery eyebrows. “All I know of him is that he was here when I came, some one hundred years ago. He is old – older even than many of my kindred, for there are few even of the eldest of my race who can remember a time when his name was not whispered. But he is human, and therefore must use his magic arts to sustain his life. How, I dare not imagine.” Quarath looked at Denubis intently. “You understand now, of course, why the Kingpriest keeps him at court?”

“He fears him?” Denubis asked innocently.

Quarath’s porcelain smile became fixed for a moment, then it was the smile of a parent explaining a simple matter to a dull child. “No, Revered Son,” he said patiently. “Fistandantilus is of great use to us. Who knows the world better? He has traveled its width and breadth. He knows the languages, the customs, the lore of every race on Krynn. His knowledge is vast. He is useful to the Kingpriest, and so we allow him to remain here, rather than banish him to Wayreth, as we have banished his fellows.”

The grisly tale about the Tower being cursed is the sort of thing you could imagine forming the basis for one of the stories inThe Lives of Saints, but what happened wouldn’t be told in detail until later books, so we’ll skip over it.

Once again the comparison between Legends and TGT serves to emphasis how the Darkling doesn’t work as an Outsider character. Rather than abandoning the Grisha, he forms the Second Army and builds the Little Palace for the protection of the Grisha and of Ravka because he sees himself as being part of those groups and subject to the social contract of mutual rights and responsibilities with them, as opposed to Fistandantilus who does nothing to protect or defend anyone but himself, because he has no interest in other mages, no known homeland, and no national allegiance.

Fistandantilus lurks around the Kingpriest’s court seemingly for no other reason that because he can, because it brings him a perverse joy to be the only mage to be indispensable enough to remain. It’s proof that he’s more powerful and more feared than any of his fellows. Although wizards as a social class are being persecuted, this is no concern of his; he’s exceptionally self-serving even for a Black Robe.

I think the chatter about Fistandantilus’ use to the court because of his vast knowledge is implicit about the Darkling in S&B, though there aren’t any quotes to support it. The Darkling (under a succession of false identities) has also traveled the world extensively:

“Aleksander had traveled throughout Ravka, to places he and his mother had visited before, to distant lands where he’d gone on his own to study. He knew the secret ways and hiding places of Grisha...”

We get a regrettably brief glimpse at one of his youthful adventures in WWSF, but other than that all his centuries prior to the trilogy, and all the wondrous things he must have learned about, are left to our imaginations.

---

If there’s one argument I’m likely to beat to death by the end of this exercise, it’s that the ongoing Grisha/Fjerda/Shu Han conflict and the overwrought analogy of the Grisha as fantasy Jews is what killed the whole story.

Fistandantilus is a cut-and-dry villain because he has never cared about anyone or anything other than himself, and he conspires against and takes advantage of people in his own social groups, not for any kind of ‘greater good’, but rather for his own gain and no other reason.

The Darkling’s status as the leader of his own oppressed minority group and the very person who originally built, and subsequently spent hundreds of years maintaining, all the social infrastructure that protects them from harm makes him too sympathetic. Regardless of how many Genyas there might have been along the way, it’s inarguable that he has saved far more lives than he has ruined. He’s not completely in the right, he does need to be stopped from destroying the world with the Shadow Fold, but unlike Fistandantilus he’s not completely in the wrong, either, because the cause is worthy.

The Darkling creating the Second Army and the Shadow Fold is the only thing that's kept the Grisha alive and kept Ravka from losing the war. The story acts like the Darkling is the main problem but in fact he's a symptom and a victim of it. No one can 'move on' from the war or the persecution because it's still happening.

In Legends, the war is over, but everyone has PTSD. Raistlin really is the main problem now, but the story still acknowledges that all of this is because he's suffering. He talks a good game to Crysania about how there are all these neglected and impoverished populations suffering out there in the world and he’s the only one who can do anything about it, but he’s not part of any of those groups, and no one has asked for his help nor has he gone to anyone and offered it; he’s denying people self-determination because he’s the chosen one and the cleverest and most powerful wizard ever, and so he thinks he knows better than anyone else. The failed time travel plot relates to the theme that you can't change the past, but you can heal from it and create a better future. But that theme only works because the war really is over.

---

Full disclosure: ‘Outsider’ is a term I made up because I have never seen this famous and very common plot structure seriously written about anywhere. My term comes from Stephen King’s ‘Outer Dark’, which was named after the Cormac McCarthy novel, which was named after Jesus’ line from Matthew “But the children of the kingdom shall be cast out into outer darkness”.

If there is an existing technical term for this type of plot/character I WOULD VERY MUCH LIKE TO KNOW, PLEASE.

---

‘Darkling’ is very cute and almost twee, like‘Inkling’. The childlike FF black mages (like Vivi) could be called darklings, but it’s not much of a title for an ancient and mighty sorcerer, is it? It only works for him in the books because he’s such an ickle baby and he’s stuck at about 21 years old.

I was really disappointed when I read that the book was originally titled after the Darkling, it seems that Alina barely exists even in the author’s mind, she’s just a vessel for Leigh to get revenge on this conglomerate imaginary wizard (for whatever reason). LotR is named after Sauron but that’s the only other epic fantasy villain title I can think of. Even Stephen King names his fantasy novels after the heroes. It’s more like naming a horror novel after the monster (Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, IT).

---

I wonder whether Leigh just plain forgot that Raistlin is the chosen one and personally saved the world in Chronicles and is an official capital-H Hero in-universe. That won’t be the last time, either. He’s very good at Hero-ing actually, I am so proud of him.

Fistandantilus is great, he’s only my 4th favourite of the Black Robes but that’s not much of a slander because Dragonlance has the best total cast of anything ever.

Less than zero redeeming qualities, this guy, he is without doubt the most evil human who ever lived. You can tell that Leigh never read any of the books beyond the original 6 because Fistandantilus’ later-revealed backstory was designed to show what Raistlin would have been like without Caramon, which is to say really fucking terrifying and absolutely nothing like the Darkling. Leigh underestimates both how good and how evil he can be.

It’s always funny seeing perspectives of people who are totally oblivious to fandoms. Raistlin is the most beloved character in all of D&D history other than maybe Drizzt on a good day. Strahd is the new hotness but he’s just a pretty face and doesn’t inspire the same bottomless pathos.

The fact that Leigh thought she could retool him into a villain and murder him is a level of insane hubris that’s worthy of Fistandantilus. That’s exactly what Fistandantilus tried to do to him and IT DIDN’T WORK BECAUSE OTHER PEOPLE LOVED HIM TOO MUCH, tell me more about how you didn’t learn anything from the story at all lmao

I wonder if she thinks Lestat is the villain of his own novels too.

Next post --->

#shadow and bone #darklina #the darkling

3 notes · View notes