Been contemplating some of the books I've read over the past year (okay, while reshelving books was pondering which to keep and reread down the road, and which to ditch). I've realized there's more than a trend -- maybe strong enough to be a consistent pattern? -- in which books entertain me repeatedly.
Lots of bad guys. Lots and lots of bad guys.
I don't mean simply "legions of bad guys arrayed against us," either. There's a fair number of urban fantasy works (and traditional fantasy, for that matter) in which the bad guys are made that much stronger than the hero and that much harder to overcome... solely through sheer numbers. Or, a variation on that theme, all the bad guys seem to be coming from disparate corners and then, eventually, the author/protag pulls back the curtain to find the one guy who's jerking everyone's strings. Knock him down, and they all fall down.
Not exactly what I meant, and although most of those stories are ones I've finished for other reasons (that is, that the bad guy issue hasn't been enough to stop me dead in the water), they're hardly satisfactory in the sense of being, uh, meaty. The individual bad guys may be, well, individual but on a motivational level -- where it really matters to me (and often where I assess personality regardless of what the author tells me) -- they're all the same. They're all in cahoots. They're all cohorts in crime, and the same crime.
I suppose you can achieve this by having characters -- good side or bad side -- who are predominantly morally ambiguous. Except on some level I think that's a cop-out, to show us 'good sides' of a 'bad guy' (or vice versa) as though this will muddy the waters in terms of who's really the antagonist. If, as a reader, you set aside all the scenes in which the author's sole purpose was (in hindsight) really just to confuse you a tiny bit about who's really Good and who's really Bad, what are you left with, and how many opposing motivations do you have on the table? Just one? Then effectively the story only has one bad guy.
Or maybe I should say: a story in which the major obstacle for the protagonist can, at some point, be considered as encapsulated or personified completely by a single character... ( is a story with too few bad guys. )
Enough for now. Must sleep. In the meantime, thoughts? (Or are you all still pondering how to get a full-grown man into the trunk of a Gremlin?)
Lots of bad guys. Lots and lots of bad guys.
I don't mean simply "legions of bad guys arrayed against us," either. There's a fair number of urban fantasy works (and traditional fantasy, for that matter) in which the bad guys are made that much stronger than the hero and that much harder to overcome... solely through sheer numbers. Or, a variation on that theme, all the bad guys seem to be coming from disparate corners and then, eventually, the author/protag pulls back the curtain to find the one guy who's jerking everyone's strings. Knock him down, and they all fall down.
Not exactly what I meant, and although most of those stories are ones I've finished for other reasons (that is, that the bad guy issue hasn't been enough to stop me dead in the water), they're hardly satisfactory in the sense of being, uh, meaty. The individual bad guys may be, well, individual but on a motivational level -- where it really matters to me (and often where I assess personality regardless of what the author tells me) -- they're all the same. They're all in cahoots. They're all cohorts in crime, and the same crime.
I suppose you can achieve this by having characters -- good side or bad side -- who are predominantly morally ambiguous. Except on some level I think that's a cop-out, to show us 'good sides' of a 'bad guy' (or vice versa) as though this will muddy the waters in terms of who's really the antagonist. If, as a reader, you set aside all the scenes in which the author's sole purpose was (in hindsight) really just to confuse you a tiny bit about who's really Good and who's really Bad, what are you left with, and how many opposing motivations do you have on the table? Just one? Then effectively the story only has one bad guy.
Or maybe I should say: a story in which the major obstacle for the protagonist can, at some point, be considered as encapsulated or personified completely by a single character... ( is a story with too few bad guys. )
Enough for now. Must sleep. In the meantime, thoughts? (Or are you all still pondering how to get a full-grown man into the trunk of a Gremlin?)