#darkwar

Drew it between commissions!!

When I first started rereading these books, I saw a thread on Reddit about them. One of the comments amounted to saying that after a certain point, the quality of the writing suddenly decreases, and I think this is around the point they put that at.

To an extent, I am sympathetic to this view, and I do agree. The quality of the writing of the Riftwar saga actually does drop off a cliff at one point, but this wasn't it. That was back around Rise of a Merchant Prince, and it's been ebbing and flowing ever since.

I can see why this would be the trilogy you put that at, though. Most people are going to just skip the Riftwar Legacy and Legends of the Riftwar trilogies because they're side stories and not super important to the main plot. This trilogy is part of the main plot, and it is noticeably worse than the Conclave of Shadows trilogy which was, for the most part, a decent trilogy.

If the fandom for this series was larger, this would probably end up being one of the most contentious trilogies for a few reasons. One is just the odd structure of the series--book one sets up some new characters and makes them out to be hugely popular, only for them to take a back seat afterwards.

Another is that there are a few points where this series does contradict earlier trilogies. A lot of that is contradictions between what happens here and what happens in the Empire trilogy, which has traditionally been one of the more popular trilogies of this series.

This is a problem that has come up in previous books. Usually it's been couched in "popular versions of history hold that this happened", so even if it's not exactly what happened previously, it can be written off as this just being the version of events that entered the public consciousness. This is fairly true-to-life because this is a thing that still happens in the modern day, even with all the advancements in record keeping and preservation that have come about as time has gone on.

The difference here in the Darkwar trilogy is that it isn't framed like that. These are just straight up contradictions. The big one is that the Minwanabi are back in this trilogy, though they don't really get up to any major shenanigans. There is some wiggle room here because technically they weren't obliterated in the Empire trilogy but rather just forced into servitude, but I feel like this is a point that needed to be expanded upon. There is a pretty large jump from "these guys were forced into political irrelevance because they kept causing problems" to "...and now they're back because reasons."

The third reason this series would probably be the controversial one if the series was more popular is because of Nakor's death. At least among the people I've known who are fans of this series, Nakor is a very popular character (for good reason) and he's a legacy character at this point. I can see this being a point that'd end up being contentious for various fandom discourse reasons.

Still, I can't help but feel that the general formula for these books is starting to get a bit stale at this point. Pretty much every mainline trilogy or every other mainline trilogy is that a new threat that's even larger than the previous one is discovered, and then there's a scramble to get ready for it but it'll never be as much time as they hope, and then the invasion begins. I think this is the most polished version of that because this trilogy doesn't really have any of the big problems the previous trilogies have had, but it's also coming at a point where most readers will be familiar enough with how these books work to be emotionally tapped out.

Really, the only major problem that existed in the early books that still exists in this one is the treatment of women. The traditional Feist problem has been that the women in his books either exist to be the love interest and nothing else, or they exist to be torture porn and nothing else.

Miranda falls somewhere in this spectrum. In some ways, she is a vast improvement over previous women in these books because at least she has some agency, has a personality, and her own motives. I feel like her motives could be fleshed out a bit more because this trilogy is still relying very heavily on the "mysterious powerful magician" characterisation given that she's been a known quantity to the rest of the main cast for over twenty years at this point, but they are there somewhere.

The flipside to this, however, is that the main reason she gets to be a part of the main cast is specifically because she's Pug's wife. I feel like if she was anyone else, the actual response to her tendency towards intense secretiveness and general combativeness would be something like, "Yeah nah, we need a team player and you're not it." She'd probably be off in the background doing something nominally important but never really remarked upon beyond that it's being done.

She also is an agent of Feist's torture porn tendency. In this case, she actually is literally tortured for a while. This is still a step up from the depictions of sexual assault as character development that happen in some of the earlier stuff, and at least she continues to be a part of the story after it instead of being forced into the background like some other characters might.

In a lot of ways, this is a good example of what I mean when I say the Darkwar trilogy is one of the more polished examples of the general Feist formula. Yes, this is still a problem with his work, but it's nowhere near the same extreme that exists earlier. It's been smoothed over so it's less of a problem here than it would have been if Feist had have written this in the late '80s rather than the late '00s.

The downside to this is that it also gives up a lot of what made the earlier books connect with readers. I know that early pastoral chapters in fantasy tend to be met with a lot of derision by readers nowadays, but in Feist's case they generally work. They do need to be there when the cast is as large as what some of these books are, both for character development and for the general pacing of the plot. I think they also generally help with the tonal balance between the shock of war and otherwordly creatures and what the characters are generally hoping to save.

So really, I think a lot of what ends up being polished at this point in the series is more the result of the pacing being sped up than anything else. I think it also gives up a lot of what humanised the protagonists early on. It's not some kind of weird accident that most of the characters in this book who seem like real people have been here since the first ten or so books.

I think the one thing this book does a lot better than previous novels in the series is that it ties in some of the side stuff a bit better. There was a period of time in the '90s when some of these books would reference the computer games inspired by the series, but that was just a quick reference here and there, and didn't really assume you'd played them.

This wasn't really the case with Wrath of a Mad God. The plotline on Kelewan assumes you've read the Empire trilogy. Like, you can still follow along even if you haven't because for the most part it is just a line here and there, but a lot of the rationale behind some of the actions of the Tsurani in this book only make complete sense if you've also read that trilogy.

Still, this is one of the books where the internal consistency starts to get a bit shaky. There's clans here that were previously destroyed in earlier books; there's lines that directly contradict what happened in previous books. To some extent, you do expect this in a series as long running as the Riftwar saga has been, especially given how the fandom for this series is relatively small and fairly quiet. Even today, the wiki for this series is pretty lackluster.

The plotline with Tad, Zane, and Jommy continued to largely be an afterthought in this book, though. The good news is that it does lead to something, albeit a small something. They add a new elvish culture on top of all the other elvish splinter groups that Feist has done little or nothing with.

That being said, I do feel like that this trilogy didn't do as much with this new generation of characters as it perhaps could have. This is especially disappointing because Flight of the Nighthawks was setting them up to be major characters the same way the core cast of the Serpentwar quadrilogy or the Krondor's Sons duology were pretty much major characters evermore after their introductions.