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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Serge" data-source="post: 1589040" data-attributes="member: 4049">At the expense of sounding like I'm defending my position (which I'm not... Just trying to get a conversation going), my distaste for Salvatore is multitiered...  Just like my distaste for Goodkind.Salvatore's writing is plodding, dull, and cheap.  His characters are generally cutout carbon copies of "traditional" archetypes.  Drizzt is generally the reluctant, yet fearsome hero, mysterious in his nature and distrusted by a world that hates his kind in spite of the good he does.  Bruegor the dwarf is...  Well, he's another grumpy dwarf who fiercely loves his friends, hates his enemies, is a father figure, and tends to be the comic relief.  Wulfgar is the huge barbarian.  Catibrie is the fiesty damsel who's more deadly than most give her credit for, but is still the girl in the middle of a love triangle.  I mean, we've seen these thousands of times before.  While I've no problem with archetypes in any genre, we've seen these particular ones done countless times to much better and less obvious effect.  Salvatore offers them up as a simple foundation to promote simple story telling.His characters are shallow.  His stories and an inch deep in a child's plastic pool.  There are no twists, surprises, or intrigue.  There's nothing to challenge the reader in any way.  The only place in which he excels is in describing his fighting scenes.  Initially, this is pretty cool.  It evokes a cinematic sense.  However, it gets tired and a worthless consumption of space.  By the third book, we know just how great these combatants are; there's no reason to belabor the point.  While he's wasting sentence after sentence describing how Drizzt swings his swords, we could be learning a bit more aobut Drizzt or any of the other characters... Or the world around them and the history that influenced the present.Plot?  Well, the plots have gotten better over time.  This much is true.  But they're still dull and predictable.  This is generally acceptable when the characters are intriguing, or there's some humor, or something.  But, we don't have that here.  Not at all.I'm not asking for a literary masterpiece.  I'm not asking for a great deal of internal consistency.  I am asking for something at least partially unique or well done.  We've neither in Salvatore's case.  Heck, I think that most people who like him (and I know a few) can recognize that he's really not as talented (at least with the WotC stuff) as many make him out to be.</blockquote>

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