flemmings | (no subject)

Occurred to me that what Sorceror-Gentleman is most like is a manga. Those oddly assorted names are oddly assorted the way the Japanese would do it. 'Golias- that's a medieval name. Goliards were named after him. And Gaston, that's French, the counts of southern France. And Dewar is a cute name. I've always liked it.'

The jumping to important bits and leaving out the interim action- even when we've been led up to expect to see the action- and the emphasis on results also feels like manga cutting. We don't need to see it all. What matters is seeing the characters' faces as they deal with what happened.

I must add, in all honesty, that the last third or so reminded me of Angel Sanctuary as well, in its chaotic three cars driving down a cliff fashion. Keeping track of who's where doing what gets impossible as the various whos set out to get hold of the other whos who have just magicked out in a blast of flame, somehow *not* taking the villain who was bolted into the room with them along. In fact the villain is both alive and in favour as of book 2, and I'm seriously perplexed as to both how and why. He's a traitor to the throne several times over, at the very least; why does the throne still think he's necessary?

I was wondering how she'd avoid having her umm major character avoid the Marty Stu pit he seemed to be so nonchalantly galloping towards. Making him male-type dense at important moments wasn't the solution I was hoping for, perhaps, though it works only too well. (Stupid *git*.) And I need to find a term for this type of character, cause Marty Stu isn't it. Peter Wimsey is, maybe. You're not supposed to identify with this perfect male, you (the female reader by default) are supposed to fall in love with him yourself.

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(coughs) I've actually got a novel which I'm trying to hawk around to agents/publishers which has a gentlemanly sorcerer. More than one, even. ;)

The notion of the magician we have is basically British and starts with Merlin. Even when benign, magicians are outside the Christian tradition and therefore have a certain suspicious quality to them already. (Medievally and Catholicly magicians are in league with the devil and hence are evil &/or damned by definition. Like Faustus. Who was more or less a gentleman as these things go, by virtue of being a scholar rather than a peasant or a shopkeeper.)

But in the Merlin tradition from which Gandalf and even Dumbledore derive, the (non-noble) magician is also outside society in the same way a priest is supposed to be. You don't ask if priests are gentlemen- the question is meaningless because they belong to God's order, not man's- and you don't ask if a magician is a gentleman for much the same reason. It may not be the devil's world he belongs to but it isn't ours. Note that Prospero is a magician only so long as he remains outside society on his island. When he returns to society he renounces magic.

Fantasy that follows from Tolkien works off the medieval view he did, where magicians are apart from society and hence not gentlemen. Update the society a bit and try to find a place for the magician in it, and you may still see the old prejudices at work. Myself I don't get this, because the first and only post-medieval magician I ever ran across was Randall Garrett's Lord
D'arcy, who is certainly a gentleman.

The thing is that gentlemanhood is both a social class and a mindset, and you have to define which you mean when you speak of someone being a gentleman. A magician is much more powerful than a 'gentleman' who merely belongs to the gentried classes; but the notion of a gentleman as defined by behaviour and not property didn't really gain ground until after people largely stopped believing inmagicians. The sorceror gentleman in this book is using the latter definition: he acts like a gentleman; but the novel's settei explicitly isolates sorcerors from the social order entirely.