Joining the crowd of " I admire your endurance " wrt keeping up with the Drizzt saga. For me the 'Vengeance of the Iron dwarf ' was the straw that broke the cammel's back. Salvatore has a bad habit of coming up with interesting premises, and then not delivering on them, imho. I was in love with Obould and his orcs , despite how flawed I think the execution was. And then it was all pushed under the rug in a way that I have found rather undignified. This was overshadowed by my feelings about the whole resurrection thing. Just like you , I deeply care about some of the characters . Keep up the good work, I come to lurk on your blog regularly.
PS. The companions of the Hall should have stayed dead.
Yeah, I hear ya about Vengeance of the Iron Dwarf. Other than wiping out a neat establishment, that book and Rise of the King were really boring and not at all memorable. It was a good point for you to stop reading, as Archmage kicked off the beginning of the sharp downward spiral, the only thing good about the books in the Homecoming Trilogy is are the cover artworks. The sad thing is, looking back now, they don't feel as horrible as I thought they were at the time, but that's not really due to my feelings about them having changed. I've simply found a new low with the more recent books.
I'm honestly not even sure that Salvatore is responsible for some of the interesting premises, Obould being one of those. I've never been much interested in orcs in any franchise, so I didn't look into whether the Obould nation was something the TTRPG spawned. I did like that Obould used a combination of brains and brawn to carve out a nation for his people right in the middle of a bunch of "civilized" strongholds, it's one of the more nuanced things that Salvatore has ever done. Obould was presented as an antagonist but at least for me, it was difficult to dislike him. The Kingdom of Many-Arrows felt like an unfamiliar addition to the Silver Marches, but it was unfamiliar in a good way; I felt like we could sense some of the other kingdoms' discomfort in having the whole area so drastically changed. There's one scene that sticks in my mind about an orc girl preparing for her wedding to a human and her mother tells her to not be subservient to her husband because her race is not inferior to his just as their kingdom is not inferior to his. It would've been neat to see Obould's people staunchly defend their claims and their legacy, forcing those around them to recognize and accept them.
But instead, we have what happened in the books. What I find the most disturbing about all of that was Catti-brie murdering goblin infants, justifying her doing as by saying they're a race that's inherently evil. Now it's established that no race is inherently evil, but all Catti-brie gets is a slap on the wrist because she's a Companion of the Hall and also the hottest woman of all time. And instead of Obould's kingdom of a misunderstood group of people proud of their heritage and fighting for acceptance, we get an impossibly and ridiculously utopic city that no one's heard of before just popping into place because it's convenient. Salvatore might not have been the one behind the creation of Callidae, but it was his choice to make it as over the top as he did.
The Companions of the Hall definitely should've stayed dead. Their stories were already told and told to excess prior to the Spellplague, all they serve to accomplish now is act as Salvatore's mouthpieces and make everything that they're involved with worse. I really don't understand how those who still can't get enough of them are that way, the only reasoning I can come up with is that those people must be of the same sort as the ones in the movie "Idiocracy" responsible for the in-universe movie "Ass" being the number one movie and winning eight Oscars including best screenplay. ]]
