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Nameless Fae Q4: Happy Ever After and tension
It's pretty obvious from the start that the book will have a "Happy Ever After" ending, with Gisele and Mal ending up together and all the bad things done away with. While the destination may be fixed and obvious, but the journey there need note be. Were the twists and turns along the way enough to keep you interested? Were you surprised by anything happening in the story?
Related is the role of "conflict" in the story. Prompted by this quote:
Modernist manuals of writing often conflate story with conflict. This reductionism reflects a culture that inflates aggression and competition while cultivating ignorance of other behavioral options. No narrative of any complexity can be built on or reduced to a single element. Conflict is one kind of behavior. There are others, equally important in any human life, such as relating, finding, losing, bearing, discovering, parting, changing. Change is the universal aspect of all these sources of story. Story is something moving, something happening, something or somebody changing.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Do you think this story was an example of these other kinds of behaviour? Was it a good example? What can you draw from the book about how to base a story around relating, finding, discovering, and so on?
Comments
The conflict in this story was internal. Both Giselle and Mal had to discover what each other was about beyond their preconceptions, as well as to change themselves internally to adjust to this new gravity. There were plenty of twists, and obstacles enough to ensure keeping my attention.
It's become very apparant to me in the past couple months that these cozy type books where the conflict is basically sucked right out of the stories because you know everything will essentially work out in the end, just do not work for me. Maybe I am some sort of mindless brute, but without at least a chance that things may end badly, I find myself not caring about the process or how things get to the ending.
The external conflict with the Wicked Prince was very easily handled, and tension was mostly provided by prolonging the wait for fulfilment. I think there were some other kinds of interaction - work in the library, gardening, the sundry peripheral fae figures, etc so there was more of a sense of an active and rather open-ended community rather than "sole hero versus the System" trope. Like @kcaryths I don't like books that are too cosy... equally I can't get engaged with ones that are too bleak and you just now it's all doomed from the start! That leaves a lot of middle ground for things to work out.
In this case I would have liked the peripheral fae inhabiting the edges of Mal's domain to have had more part in the story as it somewhat too easily reduced to just the two central characters and some rather flat background ones.
I do like that Ursula LeGuin quote.