Black Jewels: Preliminary Post

Anne Bishop said about the Black Jewels trilogy that she meant them to be based on dark mythology, that she was fascinated by the idea of how a brutal culture would function and what kind of protocols it would establish to protect the weak.

I remember a great deal of the quote. Unfortunately, I have been unable to locate it online to quote directly or link to. Although, while I was trying, I did come across the information that the Black Jewels series was previously targeted by one Requires Only That You Hate/Winterfox/acrackedmoon. If you're not familiar with any of those net-names, let's just say that her criticism of it was (ahem) in no way concerned with being fair. Luckily, I'm pretty sure I'd have to be deliberately trying to be awful to manage to be anywhere near as bad as her.

Bishop's stated goals for the series make analyzing it sometimes tricky: does she mean for this horrendous thing one of her protagonists did to be seen as horrendous?

My answer is "sometimes, but not nearly as often as that's what she achieves, and almost never to the extent she achieves it."

I'll go into more details for each specific example when dealing with those specific examples.