Thread by @ckunzelman

I just finished re-reading Salvatore's THE CRYSTAL SHARD. It kicks a lot of ass. Here's a short thread where I think about why it works so well as a fantasy novel [1/?]

Structurally, the book is wild. There are massive battles and detailed fights in the first hundred pages, and yet NOTHING BAD happens to the central characters. It is basically just a friendly romp where some nice people win a war.

This is mostly just a setup for the middle of the book making an EMPIRE STRIKES BACK maneuver. STAR WARS is all over this book, and it's probably the best that I have read that world being written back into fantasy [3]

The reason for this friendly battle romp before the EMPIRE turn, though, is that it allows Bruenor Battlehammer to become the ultimate dad. These books are known for their fight descriptions, but an equal amount of words are spent on describing mentorship and friendship. [4]

If we zoom out very far, SHARD is a novel that is schematically about the corrupting influence of evil and the allying influence of bonds of friendship. That's maybe not that surprising since it dominates post-Tolkien fantasy, but the qualities here are notable.

For ex, Bruenor functionally enslaves Wulfgar for the middle of the novel, taking him as a prisoner of war who he then trains, which creates Wulfgar later as a character who is the "best of both worlds" regarding dwarven discipline and Icewind Dale barbarian stuff

This is, of course, deeply ideological: familiar dualisms between civilization/nature, lawful/chaotic, and of course all the real world ethnic chauvinism resonances that shoot through it. Friendship and honor papers over all of this, providing this weird pathway toward civility.

When antagonist Kessell finally shows up with the shard and gets the plot going by mentally dominating a bunch of orcs / goblins / giants, it becomes clear that this novel is not just about good vs evil but much more specifically about competing modes of social organization. [8]

For the good characters, bonds are forged through obligation, honor, etc, and to be a good person is to individually choose to honor those bonds. Post enslavement, Wulfgar is understood to be good because he does not kill the man who had enslaved him. [9]

That's because that man has functionally become his father. This is contrasted with some very familiar Tolkieny versions of evil social organization from villain Akar Kessell -- mental domination, chaotic demons, orcs, goblins, etc etc held together with greed. [10]

And it works really well as an engaging ideological machine (and all of this reads so breezingly) precisely because every step of the process of becoming a "good" character is a choice. There is this kind of step-by-step pleasure of seeing how everything is rationalized morally.

So reading the book (for me) is this dissonant reaction of realizing how much I disagree with this individualist ideology while also seriously realizing how well it works as fantasy, as if a world-as-family could destroy great evil just by being excellent buds.

You'll notice I have not said much about Drizzt here. That's because he doesn't really matter all that much in this novel. He serves a function to show how tolerant people can be if you're helpful to them (that's explicit in the first third) and to act as a sword to solve plot.

It is actually kind of wild that this became The Drizzt Saga or whatever, since he really is so much less interesting than Wulfgar. However, he does have a magical sword and a magical cat, so I get it. [14]

Sorry, back to structure. So the first third is about people winning a war easily, the second third is about those people preparing for a third war, and the third third is about those people winning that war. None of this is particularly hard for them.

It's funny to read this novel from 1988 while thinking about recent calls for hopeful fantasy, because there's basically nothing more blue skies than what we get here: people easily overcoming nightmarish evil using their skills.

There are no real serious moments of peril, and I think that's partially what makes the story so compelling. It is a daytime soap dressed up like a fantasy novel; it's a romance novel at its core with how it sets up pins to easily be knocked down.

When Akar Kessell is finally defeated in the end (which, of course he is), the family nature of the entire book is brought home by a literal dad joke: Bruenor pretends to be dying, and reveals he isn't by ripping off his bandages and calling one of his adopted kids a fool. [18]

Had a real "are you kidding me" moment at the end, it was like a Shakespeare play ending with a wedding. "All fantasy novels have to end with a trick." [19]

This is all to say that, like most genre work, THE CRYSTAL SHARD is about selling our cultural values back to us, and I'll end this thread by saying that WOTC really dropped the over the past 20 years because the Icewind Dale characters are basically the Avengers. [20]

One more thing: there's a distinct pleasure when Drizzt learns the magical properties of his items that he did not know about before, and I think RPG systems should get rid of item identification through spells to preserve this wonder [END]

If you like this thread, go to patreon.com/rangedtouch and you can find me and some cohosts doing this for the Baldur's Gate games, Fallout, the novels of Stephen King, and more