Oh, and in passing...

[azurelunatic]

Comparing Anne McCaffery's villains with Lois McMaster Bujold's, Bujold's are far more human, with a better range of human failings. McCaffrey's seem, these days, to be uniformly vile and all who encounter them had damn well better hate them, because they are so vile.

Bujold's... well... Just as in real life, perhaps you might not notice that they are quite that bad, on first glance. Their brands of evil are born out of a desire to do their own right thing, in some cases. An adherence to principle. The desire to do right, even after they've lost touch with reality.

The only Bujold villains that measure up to the later McCaffrey standard of vile would be Prince Serg and Vorrutyer, the evil sex criminals. No redeeming values, there; no hope for them. The only decent thing to do for them is kill them, which happens as a midpoint to the book, not the conclusion. Still, a mindwarper like Vorrutyer is more interesting than your garden variety evil pedophile/slaver.

To be fair, I must cite the Oldtimers. Now, there were some good villains. They'd started out doing What Was Right, and the culture clash, not inherent evil of their own, turned out to be their undoing. After a while, they became a decent threat and rundown and yucky, but it was a nice character evolution. I liked it.

Menolly's parents were also good as far as ethical antagonists go. Sure, they made their daughter's life hell. But they did it in accordance with what they believed to be right, rather than doing it just for the sake of being evil. There are only so many times you can tell the story of someone evil being redeemed to good, though it's an old (and often lovely) story. It's far more interesting to get two mutually antagonistic parties, both on the side of good, talking to each other...

Character evolution good. Evil characters just for the sake of being utterly vile and evil ... no thanks. I can get that on the news if I want it.

Comments

[kdorian.livejournal.com]

Yes, true about the Oldtimers, but... some of the 'leaders' were turned into true McAffrey villans, and as for the rest... I'm sorry, but my problem with the Oldtimers is that problems didn't go on long enough. It seemed that once she'd gotten rid of the designated villans, she didn't want to bother with them any more, and called them integrated (more or less) with the modern culture.

Um, how exactly did that happen? Each Weyr, except Benson, was filled with Oldtimers, except for the women they'd essentially kidnapped on 'searches'. It was a self-reinforcing cultural center - then a few of them got into trouble, and everyone repented?! People will fight tooth and nail to hold onto their own cutlural imperatives... here, they seemed to just roll over.

That said, I have to agree - Bujold's villans are much more human, and essentially understandable. Even Serg and Vorrutyer, while not at all sympathetic villans, were comprehensible.

[azurelunatic]

Well, actually, by the time the Oldtimers became a real problem, the younglings had grown up enough in the present culture to become more acclimated to the standards there. Some of the Oldtimers stayed; those Oldtimers who weren't willing to put up and shut up were shipped off to Southern. It just doesn't mention most of the rest of them other than the main villians.

In theory, all Oldtimers were accustomed to living the priveleged life in exchange for the dangers of fighting Thread. The ones too old to adjust were the ones who later created the problem. The ones young enough to see that this Just Wasn't Done here and now had the option of quietly fitting in with the present culture and not kicking up too much of a fuss. I think it's feasable that in the flurry of the first fighting Thread, that the bossy bullying habits that the Oldtimers had started to develop could have gone away.

I seem to recall the dude who started the skirmish between Oldtimers and Present-timers by knifing F'nor saying something like, "In the old days, if he'd seen that I liked it, he would have gifted it to me."

Back in the old days, Weyrblood was the best, except for the occasional new woman kidnapped in. Present Pass, all sorts of likely young people were Searched in, and with F'lar's leadership through those first tough times, I would not think that any weyr would escape having their population at least 50% doubled by new people. Ten years later (at the least; F'lessan was a young man on a bronze by then) even young weyrbred people from the oldtimer weyrs would have a good idea of the norms expected of them in the present time. Think Old New York's children of immigrant parents, with the parents striving to keep the old ways, settling close together for comfort in the strange new world, with the kids learning the ropes of the new city, sometimes shocking their parents.

If anything, I would have expected F'lar to have more trouble with the old codgers in his own weyr right after he took over.