So I have never learned proper dreamwidth spoiler masking behaviour, so, SPOILERS FOLLOW.
The dragon is being positioned separately to that. Dragons are transcendence, personal and interpersonal; they can solve problems the best king can't. Yet what we see a dragon do is kill people.
Also deliver a broken person to his home & save two people, if we're staying within the frame of this book... within the scope of the series to date, we also know that dragons generally are Tolkienesque, to the extent of being fire-breathing hoarders who are inherently dangerous to speak with. My question about the dragons in the final three books has always been how transcendent they get to be when they're also standard fantasy dragons. "No one can explain a dragon", which UKLG says in one or another of her intros, has always struck me as 1) usefully true, at the level of symbolism she's shooting for and in many ways achieves, but also 2) a cop-out, because in some ways her dragons are shackled to mutually exclusive settings.
As to calling a dragon being a useful trick if you can do it -- isn't that equally applicable as a criticism to all of magery? Ged spends three books doing tricks that are nice if you can do them. In this book he and Tenar mostly experience what it's like when tricks that aren't nice are done to them, and then it eventuates that Therru has her own form of power. I grant that this is narratively convenient, but it doesn't seem like cheating, any more than it did for the apparently powerless village boy Ged (not Ged at that point) to usefully trick the pirates who attack the village in book one.
The wizard Aspen who shows up here is horrific and one-note, he's a sexist monologue on legs.
To me he's the pure expression of something we usually see only diluted -- or maybe, he's what you get when the bully down the road becomes the lord of the manor. That is, I don't see him as one-note so much as a representation of what certain psychologies do when you remove restraint. (The brief moment where we see him through Therru's eyes, as "a forked and writing darkness", is one of my favourite sentences in all Le Guin.)
Also! I would like to know what the other books in your pile of 18 are! It's a very good plan. (As is reordering book shelves. Mine have been frozen for too long).
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timeasmymeasure
Entirely full of spoilers
Date: 2024-03-18 03:12 am (UTC)Also deliver a broken person to his home & save two people, if we're staying within the frame of this book... within the scope of the series to date, we also know that dragons generally are Tolkienesque, to the extent of being fire-breathing hoarders who are inherently dangerous to speak with. My question about the dragons in the final three books has always been how transcendent they get to be when they're also standard fantasy dragons. "No one can explain a dragon", which UKLG says in one or another of her intros, has always struck me as 1) usefully true, at the level of symbolism she's shooting for and in many ways achieves, but also 2) a cop-out, because in some ways her dragons are shackled to mutually exclusive settings.
As to calling a dragon being a useful trick if you can do it -- isn't that equally applicable as a criticism to all of magery? Ged spends three books doing tricks that are nice if you can do them. In this book he and Tenar mostly experience what it's like when tricks that aren't nice are done to them, and then it eventuates that Therru has her own form of power. I grant that this is narratively convenient, but it doesn't seem like cheating, any more than it did for the apparently powerless village boy Ged (not Ged at that point) to usefully trick the pirates who attack the village in book one.
To me he's the pure expression of something we usually see only diluted -- or maybe, he's what you get when the bully down the road becomes the lord of the manor. That is, I don't see him as one-note so much as a representation of what certain psychologies do when you remove restraint. (The brief moment where we see him through Therru's eyes, as "a forked and writing darkness", is one of my favourite sentences in all Le Guin.)
Also! I would like to know what the other books in your pile of 18 are! It's a very good plan. (As is reordering book shelves. Mine have been frozen for too long).