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Aug. 26th, 2008 11:10 amLast time she was in town, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
genarti lent me Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population because she knows I have a have a fondness for that extremely rare quantity in sf/f: grumpy elderly female protagonists (*cough*SophieHatter*cough*). If I had been smart, I would have held off on finishing it until after Dragon*Con so as to lure her back down here to get it back! But I was not smart, and so instead I finished it yesterday.
I admired this book quite a lot. It's slow, thoughtful and original; although the plot involves first contact with aliens and planetary colonization, it's more of a character study than anything else. Ofelia is well into her seventies or eighties, and has worked and raised children and listened to others and had very little time to herself all her life - so when the company decides that her colony has failed and everyone needs to be evacuated from the planet, she maneuvers herself into getting left behind, the only human being in what's left of the colony. And she loves it. When sentient inhabitants of the planet show up, her first reaction is extreme irritation along the lines of 'why do I have to deal with people again?' The development of her character in solitude, and then, again, with the new species, drives most of the book, with other characters really only showing up at the end.
This meant that the biggest flaw of the book (in my opinion) only really had time to bother me at the beginning and at the end - and it's not really a huge flaw, but it is something that I've become perhaps overly sensitive to in literature. I am not really sure what to call it except Irritating People Syndrome. In books afflicted with Irritating People Syndrome, anyone the main character finds annoying (unless they're annoying in obviously pre-romantic tension ways) is almost guaranteed to (in the best-case scenario) continue being annoying with absolutely no positive character traits, and (in the worst-case scenario) turn out to be downright evil. I think I first started noticing Irritating People Syndrome in Mercedes Lackey novels, but Elizabeth Moon suffers from it to a certain extent too. Because I am ornery sometimes, when a character gets classed as an Irritating Person, my hackles go up and I immediately start looking for ways to sympathize with them. The son and daughter-in-law that Ofelia decides she doesn't care about spending the rest of her life with are both Irritating People, which meant that I had a hard time sympathizing with Ofelia at first because she was judging them so harshly. I don't mind judgmentalness at all in main characters as long as they get to be wrong - in fact, I love when main characters dislike each other, it gives me warm fuzzies - but when the author validates that judgmentalness, I get twitchy.
And now I am curious - is this just a personal pet peeve of mine, or does anyone else notice Irritating People Syndrome? Or do you notice but it doesn't bother you?
genarti lent me Elizabeth Moon's Remnant Population because she knows I have a have a fondness for that extremely rare quantity in sf/f: grumpy elderly female protagonists (*cough*SophieHatter*cough*). If I had been smart, I would have held off on finishing it until after Dragon*Con so as to lure her back down here to get it back! But I was not smart, and so instead I finished it yesterday. I admired this book quite a lot. It's slow, thoughtful and original; although the plot involves first contact with aliens and planetary colonization, it's more of a character study than anything else. Ofelia is well into her seventies or eighties, and has worked and raised children and listened to others and had very little time to herself all her life - so when the company decides that her colony has failed and everyone needs to be evacuated from the planet, she maneuvers herself into getting left behind, the only human being in what's left of the colony. And she loves it. When sentient inhabitants of the planet show up, her first reaction is extreme irritation along the lines of 'why do I have to deal with people again?' The development of her character in solitude, and then, again, with the new species, drives most of the book, with other characters really only showing up at the end.
This meant that the biggest flaw of the book (in my opinion) only really had time to bother me at the beginning and at the end - and it's not really a huge flaw, but it is something that I've become perhaps overly sensitive to in literature. I am not really sure what to call it except Irritating People Syndrome. In books afflicted with Irritating People Syndrome, anyone the main character finds annoying (unless they're annoying in obviously pre-romantic tension ways) is almost guaranteed to (in the best-case scenario) continue being annoying with absolutely no positive character traits, and (in the worst-case scenario) turn out to be downright evil. I think I first started noticing Irritating People Syndrome in Mercedes Lackey novels, but Elizabeth Moon suffers from it to a certain extent too. Because I am ornery sometimes, when a character gets classed as an Irritating Person, my hackles go up and I immediately start looking for ways to sympathize with them. The son and daughter-in-law that Ofelia decides she doesn't care about spending the rest of her life with are both Irritating People, which meant that I had a hard time sympathizing with Ofelia at first because she was judging them so harshly. I don't mind judgmentalness at all in main characters as long as they get to be wrong - in fact, I love when main characters dislike each other, it gives me warm fuzzies - but when the author validates that judgmentalness, I get twitchy.
And now I am curious - is this just a personal pet peeve of mine, or does anyone else notice Irritating People Syndrome? Or do you notice but it doesn't bother you?
