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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2531 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 25, 2026

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So, what are you reading?

I'm picking up Pierce's The Life and Legacy of Ja'far al-Sadiq. Still on Archaeology of Babel.

I was in the mood for cheap fantasy and a lot of people recommended Joe Abercrombie's First Law series as being really good. And it's not that bad, I got midway through the third book so it can't have been that painful, but it's reminding me of the degree of schlock that exists out there in the world, that I haven't really interacted with.

The tone is hopelessly GrimDerp. On the one hand Abercrombie wants to have a brutal world where people are constantly torture-murdered for no reason by mysterious government agencies, a cynical "gritty realism" where characters on a DnD adventure say things like "This wasn't how it went in the stories!" On the other hand, everything is super lightweight, with no effort at realism or serious effort at world building or character creation. Religion is supposed to be a scam, I think, but there's no effort at actually building a religious foundation to the work. The world is weirdly modern, with "bathrooms" and dentists, but no real attention is given to what level of development exists or doesn't exist in the setting.

Characters have no consistent values. Sex is post-Sexual Revolution casual but look out oh no there's the medieval patriarchy, but also characters don't actually do anything interesting when confronted with it they just kind of shrivel. The women are too open and powerful and feminist, but supposedly acknowledged to be exceptional but we don't see any other women so... He wants to create complex characters that do bad things sometimes but also have heroic qualities, but misses the mark, the sins don't have much weight and the struggles feel fake as a result. The best books that use grimdark settings present us with likeable characters that we identify with, that act according to their own internal sense of right and wrong with a consistent moral compass, then deliver a result that is so brutal and discordant that it creates psychic discomfort in the reader and makes you think.

The writing is idiomatic to modern English. The "brutish uncivilized northern barbarians" will use phrases like "That's the point of fucking exercise." There's no real dialect within the text across different regions, other than the fantasy-Africans using the racial slur "pink" for the fantasy-Europeans, as in "I'm stuck here with this group of pinks" or "you don't know what you're talking about, pink;" which might be my favorite racial slur for white people of all time.

The example that finally got me to give up on the third book was this: a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences. He gets an arranged marriage because, you know, of course he does. His wife, on their wedding night, refuses him, knees him in the testicles, and makes clear she will never sleep with him. And it's very confusing to me why he doesn't rape her, or at least consider it and give a reason why he can't. The setting has been persistently grimdark up to this point, and we're dealing with a feudal patriarchy in which this marriage was arranged, the character himself is shown to be of questionable moral fiber at numerous points. But then his wife refuses him on his wedding night and he just...tolerates it? This is what I mean when I say creating a morally grey-dark grey grimdark universe can create an interesting values dissonance, how does one deal with a refusing wife when one's marriage is a political creation to begin with? Is it, in fact, the king's duty to rape his wife and seek to produce an heir? Alternatively, he can deal with the political consequences of an annulment, which could be severe but are necessary if she won't do her wifely duty. What doesn't work is telling me, the reader, that the young king just sits there and stews. That dog don't hunt.

Anyway it's fine enough as a book if you want schlock, but I forgot how much schlock there was in the world. And it's making me think about the recent discourse in themotte about "female characters" and similar, in that so much of complaint about the lack of quality representation of such-and-such is that people read garbage and call it literature. There's great genre fiction, but there's also so much junk, and this isn't even close to the junkiest junk, and I think that the complaints about things like "rounded female characters" are a matter of expecting genre junk to be literature.

a character becomes king through a series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences.

You are slightly wrong here, though I think the reveal is at the end of this book. I thought it was kinda of foreshadowed but in general the character responsible is generally subtle and is very much part of the grim-dark element trope subversion element. I think thats a pretty core part of his writing theory. He wants to subvert fantasy tropes in a dark/grim way. As Tanista said below, Bakker does it better.

The king doesn't rape his wife because he's a coward. That's the whole point of why he was chosen to become king.

Overall I don't think you are wrong about your reading that Ambercrombie really throws a ton of modern anachronisms into his writing. His prose is essentially Sanderson-tier and his worldbuilding is not that good. Lots of inconsistent values. I do think the second series on the industrial revolution is better, mostly because the values are a bit more aligned with his apparent blindspot. But I don't think consistent worldbuilding is his forte. He seems to be a character-oriented writer. And the three characters he wants to write are Logan, Bayaz and Old Sticks. Everyone else is weaker, but still enjoyable.

You are slightly wrong here, though I think the reveal is at the end of this book. I thought it was kinda of foreshadowed but in general the character responsible is generally subtle and is very much part of the grim-dark element trope subversion element. I think thats a pretty core part of his writing theory. He wants to subvert fantasy tropes in a dark/grim way.

The lack of foreshadowing is part of the trope-subversion, things just happen without massive buildup. This can work really well as a rug-pull subverting expectations, but without a connection to the characters or otherwise caring about what happens, it ends up feeling to me like "a bunch of things happen" rather than "a story." Subverting expectations works when the writer is cleverly creating expectations and then dashing them, once I have no expectations there's nothing to subvert.

The king doesn't rape his wife because he's a coward. That's the whole point of why he was chosen to become king.

If that's what he was going for, he just didn't land that plane for me. The whole scene was anachronistic and immersion breaking.

There's not really a lack of foreshadowing here. I think its pretty well foreshadowed. It's the character trope that is being subverted. It just becomes a lot more clear after you understand the weird inconsistencies that you saw but were missing understanding for. One could argue, that Abercrombie is not a good enough writer if the big twist is not deducible prior without knowledge of the ending, which is fair, and might be true. But I do think the idea that its a "series of completely unforeshadowed unlikely coincidences" is wrong.

Spoiler: Bayaz is deliberately manipulating Jezal into the throne because he's spineless coward and the son of a whore Bayaz bought. He knows he can control him. Bayaz is probably at fault for 90% of bad things that have happened in this world. He's evil Gandalf/evil Dumbledore. There are a bunch of clues from the other magi about this. Khalul is pretty much correct

Spoilers

No, I get all that argument and storyline, I just don't really buy it! And that can also be my perception, the series is very reliant on the use of tropes to engage in storytelling. The reader is very much meant to come in with a pre-existing understanding of like 95% of the stuff in the story, so that Abercrombie doesn't have to waste time explaining it to us. This isn't inherently bad, but the thin characterization of Jezal leaves him open to reader interpretation, and I just don't really buy him as the spineless coward that can be manipulated at will, or buy "idiot king who is manipulated at will" as a real archetype. Jezal starts as a lazy, indolent young officer, like Nikolai Rostov in Tolstoy. He grows through his determination to compete in the Contest following his encounter with Glokta ("I'm going to prove everyone wrong by working super hard"), and again from his wounds during his adventures with Logan and Bayaz (becoming less arrogant and abrasive to his lessers, killing two men in combat, losing his looks). Then any kind of growth is just sort of erased, we don't hear about any of it again, Jezal is right back to being lazy and drunk and indolent. He's back to being the young officer who doesn't want to train for the contest. Which is fine, that's what Abercrombie is going for; but I find it boring. If prior events will have no impact on later events, then what am I reading exactly? That's not a story, it's just a series of what Joe Abercrombie thinks are cool fantasy set pieces. No one is going to grow or change, everything that happens later could have happened without what happens earlier. If you cut out the entire middle bit about the quest, and just have Bayaz install Jezal after the contest win, and Logan wander back north, nothing really changes.

And I'll again note that I gave up late in the third book, and might not have given up at all if it weren't for my current mood (newborn baby) so my criticism is limited, the book wasn't bad, just not perfect.

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