If he's a nobleman's son, what on earth is he doing working as a shepherd?
Considering what we later learn about Elthryn and his brothers, pretty sure we're meant to take away that he was a nobleman-in-name-only at this point.
He broke one of the golden rules of writing fiction: introduce the initial setting and the characters in it before you destroy it and kill everyone. In the last fantasy trilogy I wrote we get to see the protagonist's home and how he lives in it and who his friends are and such in the first chapter. Later on when the place is laid waste by the villains I made special mention of him seeing the dead bodies of the named characters I had previously made a few mentions of, which helps to hammer home just how much he has lost and that these were people and not just faceless redshirts who were murdered.
*seconding all of this*
It's THINE own, you moron.
Unfortunately, Greenwood writes Elminster - and to a lesser extent, everyone else from Athalantar - with a very inconsistent faux-medieval dialect. It's very distracting.
You know what this reminds me of? The first draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. According to Roald Dahl, he originally had like twenty odd awful children whose awfulness he described in great detail because he was having so much fun doing it. Then he showed the manuscript to his daughter, who said "Dad, this is really boring". So he sensibly trimmed it down to the four we see in the mostly final version.
Alas, if Greenwood ever had anyone who said anything like that to him... pretty sure he ignored them. It's the only explanation for just how... inexplicably bad some of his stuff is (like the random twenty-year timeskip he throws into the last quarter of Elminster in Myth Drannor that somehow fails to affect the plot at all).
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Date: 2024-06-05 04:07 pm (UTC)Considering what we later learn about Elthryn and his brothers, pretty sure we're meant to take away that he was a nobleman-in-name-only at this point.
He broke one of the golden rules of writing fiction: introduce the initial setting and the characters in it before you destroy it and kill everyone. In the last fantasy trilogy I wrote we get to see the protagonist's home and how he lives in it and who his friends are and such in the first chapter. Later on when the place is laid waste by the villains I made special mention of him seeing the dead bodies of the named characters I had previously made a few mentions of, which helps to hammer home just how much he has lost and that these were people and not just faceless redshirts who were murdered.
*seconding all of this*
It's THINE own, you moron.
Unfortunately, Greenwood writes Elminster - and to a lesser extent, everyone else from Athalantar - with a very inconsistent faux-medieval dialect. It's very distracting.
You know what this reminds me of? The first draft of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. According to Roald Dahl, he originally had like twenty odd awful children whose awfulness he described in great detail because he was having so much fun doing it. Then he showed the manuscript to his daughter, who said "Dad, this is really boring". So he sensibly trimmed it down to the four we see in the mostly final version.
Alas, if Greenwood ever had anyone who said anything like that to him... pretty sure he ignored them. It's the only explanation for just how... inexplicably bad some of his stuff is (like the random twenty-year timeskip he throws into the last quarter of Elminster in Myth Drannor that somehow fails to affect the plot at all).