http://cobalt-cin.livejournal.com/ ([identity profile] cobalt-cin.livejournal.com) wrote in [community profile] lkh_lashouts2010-06-15 11:20 pm
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Failure of Merry Gentry?

Hi Guys!

I have been a Lurker for quite a while and have read along nodding with alot of the points you have all brought up on here. I was just wondering though the focus seems to be more on the AB series and granted this has fallen a long, long way since Obsidian Butterfly. I stopped reading the series after NIC but have followed the rest of the series in the brillaint blogs posted on here. Thank you, all of you who have saved me the time of actually reading them myself. It is rather like watching a rollercoaster to hell as the series sinks even further.

My question for you is did anybody ever read the Merry Gentry like i did and prefer it? When I read the first Merry book I thought it was great. I had read the first three AB books by the time i read the first Merry book. I preferred it to the AB series. I thought it was a better premise and being more into mythology, Old World Fairy Tales and the Fae I found it really interesting. I initially liked the fact she was loud and proud about her sexual activities and likes and it got me up to the third book believe it or not. I liked the world that was set up and characters surrounding Merry, including her men all had sinister, suspect motivies. I find it rather sad the series has been ruined in Hamilton's hands. Does anyone else see that this series had the bones of a really awesome series that failed? What do you think Hamilton could have done to make it a better series, aside from not assasinating characters like Doyle and Sholto or turning it into a sexual free for all, or what could another author have done with this? Yasmine Galenorn and a few YA authors I've read over the years feature Fae and do a far better job, making them into the scary, unnerving and unpredictible Fae I expect to see.

[identity profile] nightmer.livejournal.com 2010-06-15 06:20 pm (UTC)(link)
I think I read the first MG book about the same time I was reading the earlier Anita books. I thought the plot was kinda interesting but the Anita books were more so. By the time I finished AB and got back to MG I'd lost my patience with them. The series take a lot of the aggravating elements of AB and makes them worse. The self-absorbed speshul speshul narrator, the flimsy excuses forcing the heroine into porn, the long drawn-out descriptions of everything Merry-related. I re-read one of the earlier paragraphs describing the three rings of Merry's irises in depth and couldn't stop rolling my own eyes.

The ideas are neat, and I probably would have been more tolerant of the annoying parts of the series if Anita hadn't done it first. 90% of my problems with the series could be fixed if LKH laid off making Merry the center of everyone's universe. MG had less far to fall than AB, but the series has still been a disappointment.