YOU MAY BE RIGHT. sigh, that thing where sometimes the nicest thing you can say of canon is 'please please be trolling, PLEASE.' (I have this same problem with Final Fantasy XIII, which really is packed with troll-meta and lesbians but sometimes you just have to admit that half the dev team didn't get the memo and some of the awful is straight, sincere and does not have a clever double meaning. :/ ) A couple of weeks ago I was, lols, rereading bits of Promise while trying to write a threesome (and failing, or at least, shelving my entire first attempt), and feeling whiplashed between its overall terribleness and the scenes & character moments that are pure gold. There's that one paragraph in the everything / nothing / i don't know scene that pivots on a period from some of the best lines in canon into some eyewatering, wallbanging purple that makes one wonder who the fuck betaed this shit.
eta, about unreliability: Van's initial opinions of many characters wind up being drastically wrong. He is way easy to blindside. I don't think it's just for dramatic reasons - he is clearly bad at reading people. And I do think that the Dating Advice For Catgirls Scene is pretty critical of Van/Lendel (and makes a fun contrast with the bit in Promise where Van is giving Randi terrible Van/Lendel-based dating advice). So, there's that. I definitely don't think canon endorses Lendel nearly as hard as the fandom does.
Yeah, I've not read new canon and doubt I ever will. Things I have read, listed in roughly the order in which I read them; the LHM, By the Sword, the Mage Winds (out of order; Fate was the one I read last, iirc by several years), Sword of Ice ://///, the Arrows, the Storms, Oathblood, Take A Thief, Brightly Burning. Thus I gradually realised idgaf about anything except my OTP. TBH I'm fond of Firesong, Kero, Need and Talia, but...oh god were the Storms boring and nothing has induced me to get interested in canon since then. The only reason I've read as much of it as I have is that I was living with my sister, who is one of those people who will drop $100+ on books in a weekend if no one talks her out of it; apart from the LHM, the only ones I even own are Winds of Fury and Arrow's Flight. *shrug*
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eta, about unreliability: Van's initial opinions of many characters wind up being drastically wrong. He is way easy to blindside. I don't think it's just for dramatic reasons - he is clearly bad at reading people. And I do think that the Dating Advice For Catgirls Scene is pretty critical of Van/Lendel (and makes a fun contrast with the bit in Promise where Van is giving Randi terrible Van/Lendel-based dating advice). So, there's that. I definitely don't think canon endorses Lendel nearly as hard as the fandom does.
Yeah, I've not read new canon and doubt I ever will. Things I have read, listed in roughly the order in which I read them; the LHM, By the Sword, the Mage Winds (out of order; Fate was the one I read last, iirc by several years), Sword of Ice ://///, the Arrows, the Storms, Oathblood, Take A Thief, Brightly Burning. Thus I gradually realised idgaf about anything except my OTP. TBH I'm fond of Firesong, Kero, Need and Talia, but...oh god were the Storms boring and nothing has induced me to get interested in canon since then. The only reason I've read as much of it as I have is that I was living with my sister, who is one of those people who will drop $100+ on books in a weekend if no one talks her out of it; apart from the LHM, the only ones I even own are Winds of Fury and Arrow's Flight. *shrug*