obediah

I've seen a bit of conversation about this series in a few other threads, but rather than try to take them off-topic, I figured I'd start a dedicated thread to see what people think.

To start with, I'm the kind of person that generally finishes a book/series if I make it past the first few chapters. Sometimes I end up involved in a series that I just want to die, and SoT is getting to be that way.

I enjoyed the first book quite a bit, it wasn't the most original, but it seemed to be a good , mature take on a fantasy world that had some good ideas and was willing to break rules to make a good read (something George RR Martin went on to du much better at).

I grabbed the next few books and although not as good, they were still interesting. Over the course of these books a lot of fantasy cliches and motifs were woven in, and the situations our romantic leads fell into touched on every grade school fantasy a boy could have about saving and impressing the girl.

As our heroes managed to work themselves into deeper and darker and less interesting pits, Goodkind starting working more and more modern moralistic ideals into the novels. Luckily I can't remember all of it, but he's gone after communism and socialism in a big way. Pacifism, cowardice, blah, blah, blah he hits on them all.

It was like Goodkind died and then all of the sudden Tom Clancy and the ghost of Ayn Rand were writing the books. The "bad" guyes all became very heavy-handed exagerated straw-men of modern ideals. Of course a communist is bad when his other hobbies are butchering babies, torture, raping women and boys, and trying to kill the heroes.

Much like Atlas Shrugged extremely exagerated and clearly "good or evil or evil-now-good or good-now-evil" characters and page upon page of in-chracter lecturing really start to drag on.

At the motif picking is only getting worse. It's like if you watch sitcoms after awhile you can tell what's going to happen in an epsidode of one series based on other series.."uh oh kid A wrecks the car and kid B knows and even though A and B fight all the time B covers for them", etc..

I was wondering if others feel the same way, or more interestingly what people that like where the series is going think?

Does anyone know of fantasy series where the left is crammed down our throats? I'd be interested in seeing if my objection is the slant of the moralistic lesson or that it exists at all (or at least it's implementation).