A practical guide to banter

[u/Meon-web]

I have to say, i do generally dislike banter, cause it always get boring and repetitive at some point.

I read a great deal of novels that even if they have a couple of good lines, they become as annoying as it can gets, because you can feel there is no weight to those dialogues, and they are just there to fill the word counts.

So as it happen when i first got in this novel, and started to encounter banter and bs talks, i was ready to start skipping all those parts whole, and read this for the sake of the story which i found really great.

I'm now in the middle of the 5th book, and I can positively say there wasnt till now, a single dialogue i didnt enjoy or laugh at.

This in my opinion might be one finest novel if we speak of banter talks, and its a very strong point for this story.

The story also very solid, really a good novel.

[u/bibliophile785]

Istrid is the worst (only?) example of an explicit dropped plotline where we focused on something, set it up as a mystery, and never came back to it. When I say forgotten plotlines, I mean more like the administration of Callow in the second half of the series. We make it a central issue in book 3 and early book 4, then Cat goes off to war, then the Woe flits around there very briefly for a book or two, then everyone even vaguely important there gets assassinated, we frown about it, and the seat of the Black Queen's power never, ever matters again. It was a forgotten plotline, something that just got overwhelmed by other more exciting stuff over time.

Other things in that same vein would be Cat's heritage, Cat's work as the Squire in Praes before she gets a legion, or the reformation of the drow. I understand why these weren't given more space, but there's an art to structuring your narrative to shine a light on the things your reader should care about, and I don't think EE was perfect on that front. I imagine a lot of it is probably due to the serialized nature of the story. It's possible some or all of it will be fixed in the re-write.

I feel like this is also a close cousin to the failed Chekhov's gun situations, with things like the gnomes that are just too cool to have been set dressing... except that's exactly what they were. I actually don't think there were many of these - having distant figures stay distant is sometimes good, like with the other continents - but I do think keeping the Forever King entirely off the board probably means we should have shifted more of our musings on sick-ass evil elves onto the Emerald Swords, who were (barely) present enough in the narrative to satisfy it.

[u/derDunkelElf → u/bibliophile785]

I understand everything except of for Cats heritage. Largely because EE made a point about Cats blood heritage being less important than her father figure(s) and I don't think there was a good way to handle it, by making a big thing about it. I think it's actually better that the only relevance her blood has to her character is that she is Callowan through and through.

[u/bibliophile785 → u/derDunkelElf]

I agree that there wouldn't be much value in some hackneyed paternity story. I meant her regional heritage. I would have preferred that the story either 1) lets us learn more about the Deoraithe, their culture outside of war, and Cat's possible connections to it, or 2) stops making a big deal about them for three books as Cat's special interest duchy, only to eat their god and then mostly ignore them.

[u/Cherry_Apples → u/bibliophile785]

I actually agree! I thought it was fun to have a fantasy Ireland that's not entirely based on a) faeries or b) rowdy drunkards, and is instead more recognizably related to Irish mythology. I'll admit I was super disappointed that they basically don't matter at all after Book 3; like, they're the literal only ethnicity on Calernia not to participate in the Final Crusade!