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Mar. 30th, 2014 07:39 pmI have to admit I pretty much had the same reaction Helena had to Kachua's death.
While there was gore and violence before, this was the first real "shocking" death of the series. A character who we've spent the past two volumes getting to know and a character who've we've spent this volume following people trying to save her. In a just narrative her death would've never happened. It was hideously unfair, nothing she and Wycliffe had done has earned them that kind of fate.
And that's largely the point.
You can argue that Kachua's death was mainly for shock value. There's a nice article by a critic called Filmcrithulk critiquing Game of Thrones storytelling. How George RR Martin keeps trying to recreate the shocking ending of book one to diminishing returns. One of the weaknesses of Eden is that the same thing happens hers. Characters who are introduced get killed in collateral to our protagonist's actions, over and over again. There was moment which really annoyed me, where they introduced a child character in such a way that telegraphed her death a chapter later.
But at the same time, it has to happen that way. One of the themes of Eden is the nature of violence, and how violence doesn't protect anyone. There's a child later on in the series who encounters Nomad, and upon the end of it decides that he wants nothing to do with them, calling them angels of death. In the real world if you hit a man on the head hard enough to knock him unconscious, there's a good chance that he'll go in a coma. When USA invaded Iraq, they thought they were going to quickly dispose a tyrant and liberate a country. What they got was over 100, 000 civilian deaths in a prolonged conflict. This is the world our characters inhabit, and they're damned by it.
While there was gore and violence before, this was the first real "shocking" death of the series. A character who we've spent the past two volumes getting to know and a character who've we've spent this volume following people trying to save her. In a just narrative her death would've never happened. It was hideously unfair, nothing she and Wycliffe had done has earned them that kind of fate.
And that's largely the point.
You can argue that Kachua's death was mainly for shock value. There's a nice article by a critic called Filmcrithulk critiquing Game of Thrones storytelling. How George RR Martin keeps trying to recreate the shocking ending of book one to diminishing returns. One of the weaknesses of Eden is that the same thing happens hers. Characters who are introduced get killed in collateral to our protagonist's actions, over and over again. There was moment which really annoyed me, where they introduced a child character in such a way that telegraphed her death a chapter later.
But at the same time, it has to happen that way. One of the themes of Eden is the nature of violence, and how violence doesn't protect anyone. There's a child later on in the series who encounters Nomad, and upon the end of it decides that he wants nothing to do with them, calling them angels of death. In the real world if you hit a man on the head hard enough to knock him unconscious, there's a good chance that he'll go in a coma. When USA invaded Iraq, they thought they were going to quickly dispose a tyrant and liberate a country. What they got was over 100, 000 civilian deaths in a prolonged conflict. This is the world our characters inhabit, and they're damned by it.
