Failure of Merry Gentry?

[cobalt-cin.livejournal.com]

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.

Comments

[vlredreign.livejournal.com]

Funny thing. I fell in love with the Anita books in the beginning. I came across Circus Of The Damned in the library, and then hunted for others, so I read them out of order. I finally did re-read the first 7 in order, so that the events made sense. After the rape the wasn't (according to LKH) in NiC, I really lost my appetite for Anita. I hung in there for 3 more books (yes, masochist over here), then gave it up. I hated Micah, the ardeur, Micah, the emasculation of Jean Claude, the whininess of Richard, and the ho-ish, homophobic Anita. Basically, I hate that LKH took a great character and a great premise and wrecked it.

Then came Merry. I read them from the first, and loved those, too. What I loved was the Fae world. LKH took some basic Fae legnd and created this whole civil war, which was a cool idea. The Unseelie Court accepting everyone that was different, odd...ugly in the eyes of the Seelie Court. Very cool. Andais was a psycho, but that was okay, too. Uncle Whats-his-nuts, the king of the Seelie Court, cool move making him a sicko. Getting to pick guys to have sex with that haven't had any in a thousand years, SCORE!!! And then...yeah.

The premise was good, the civil war was good...but Merry remaining mortal? Dumb. And seriously, I see how that made for an interesting twist, but still...dumb. How are you gonna be Queen of a people when they live forever and you're gonna pop your clogs in about 50 years?? But okay, I dealt with that. The six daddies for two babies?? I know I flunked biology, but I would have paid more attention if we had covered this phenomena!

I think what made the Merry series better was that we knew we were getting a lot of sex from the beginning, there was an outline, and while there were still rampant typos and editing issues (y'all remember the 'insert here' fiasco?), it was still better in a lot of ways. Just like the Anita books were good right up to the chapter in NiC when Anita, JC and Richard were going upstairs to have a threesome. Once they got up there...the books turned to stir fried shit. Actually, the best thing that could have happened would have been for Anita to die when she got gored.

[roguetailkinker.livejournal.com]

I could be mistaken, but didn't they figure out that Merry is no longer mortal? She thought she was still mortal because she was feeling sick and immortals don't get diseases, but then she realized it was morning sickness from being pregnant.


Not addressing any particular person, but this has bugged me for some time:

The fey are magic. They can make dead plants come to life with a touch, they can bring a storm from a clear sky, they can make people see things that aren't there, so why do so many people seem shocked and disgruntled that their procreating involves magic too? LKH didn't even make that up, she took it from Celtic legend about the sidhe. Maybe some people here should go tell the Irish that their mythology ought to follow the rules of biology?

I'm no LKH fangirl, but I wish people here wouldn't try so hard to find things to complain about. The Anita Blake series is one thing, but she stated from the start of the MG series that these are magical beings and the rules are different for them.

[world-dancer.livejournal.com]

I think the biology thing is grating to people in cases where 6 men father 2 children, magic or no, because then it feels like a convenient excuse the author came up with to avoid the unpleasantness of getting rid of some of her characters (which she can't deal with), rather than an organic part of the story. Maybe it would fly if it were done better or by a different author, maybe not.

Biology as far as when they were having sex vs. waiting for ovulation, I always thought that was fine because, hey, magic.

[roguetailkinker.livejournal.com]

I see your point, but grousing about it being a deus ex machina and thus bad writing is not quite the same as complaining that it's bad biology. :-)

[fadeinthewash.livejournal.com]

I'm no LKH fangirl, but I wish people here wouldn't try so hard to find things to complain about. The Anita Blake series is one thing, but she stated from the start of the MG series that these are magical beings and the rules are different for them.

You make a good point, but it would also help if LKH didn't like whipping out her so-called biology degree and blathering about making her worlds realistic so people will accept the impossible.

See, to me, that would require thought, and maybe the explanation wouldn't get into the text, but the mechanisms would be all laid out. For example, consider any vampire myth...let's take feasting on blood. You could say it works by magic and leave it at that, or you could ponder out capillary action and digestion and circulation, which would in turn affect healing abilities and sexual abilities or not, what kind of blood is acceptable and therefore who is victimized by vampires...and so on.

By the by, did one of the multi-fathers of Celtic legend help knock the lady up after she went down on him? Because that also really strains credulity.

[roguetailkinker.livejournal.com]

I see your point, and I wonder about that bio degree anyway. You'd think four years of classes would teach her that "genetics" does not mean the same thing as "genes" and shouldn't be used in its place.

So far as I know, that particular story didn't have conception from anything but regular sex, but mythology in general has much weirder things happen. Look at Athena's origins, for examples:

In order to avoid a prophecy made when that change occurred, that any offspring of his union with Metis would be greater than he, Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from having offspring, but she already was pregnant with Athena. Metis gave birth to Athena and nurtured her inside Zeus until Zeus complained of headaches and called for Hephaestus to split open his head with his smithing tools. Athena burst forth from his forehead fully armed with weapons given by her mother.

And Aphrodite's? Even weirder:
According to Greek poet Hesiod, she was born when Cronus cut off Uranus' genitals and threw them into the sea, and from the aphros (sea foam) arose Aphrodite.

Kind of make conception-by-blowjob seem normal by comparison, don't they?

(I'm sure there are "unusual" conceptions in Celtic mythology as well, but Greek/Roman is more my area of expertise.)

[fadeinthewash.livejournal.com]

Kind of make conception-by-blowjob seem normal by comparison, don't they?

Hahaha; point.

And from what I've read, her dual biology and English degrees came from some obscure Midwestern university. Note to high school grads: avoid that one.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

I think that LKH was an indifferent student as well. She also uses her putative biology degree as kind of the magical all-science knowledge that you find in fiction. Unless she took 200 credits in biology alone, which seems unlikely, she can't be the expert at all the various different subdisciplines that she claims expertise in because "I have a bio degree".

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

There are at least two conceptions by swallowing a fly that landed in your drink, from memory. And the fly is the child in fly form.

Just think of all the shagging Merry could have saved herself by dunking one of the little fairies in her coffee and slurping it down!

[roguetailkinker.livejournal.com]

Sex with hot men or drinking a fly... I have to say I'm with LKH on this one!

[suzycat.livejournal.com]

Heh.