Wednesday 25 October 2017

The Faerie Queen, Book One Canto Two




So in the first Canto we got the classic Triumuvate of Heroic Knight, Chaste Lady and eeeevil sneaky Wizard, almost like a fractal of all knightly tales.

Now we add to that a savage Sarizen and a sexy but deceatful hot chick, its interesting just how rapidly the Red Crosse knight is tricked and deceaved. These architypal characters are almost like min-maxed RPG characters, utterly overwhelmingly adept in one particular way but insanely incompetant in others.

The Knight always wins a fight but is fooled by every lie he is told, the wizard can never win a fight but can delude anyone with illusions and lies, (he even has direct contact with Neil Gaimans Sandman), but he can never directly harm anyone, only trick them into harming themselves. The chaste maiden - I'm not sure how I would break that down, she seems to be incorruptible, and no-one ever seems to directly harm her but she can't actually directly do anything, she can only appeal for others to act.

I didn't really get into it in the first Canto but its impressive just how much stuff there is in it. Spenser is a crowd-pleaser, and good at it, we get a cool monster fight, a thrilling twist where the holy man is revealed to be (gasp) an evil sneaky Wizard, some cool very genre-appropriate magic stuff, some creepy sex dreams and then out, all in one Canto. It's almost a pilot episode, and a good one.

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