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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9895718" data-attributes="member: 18">Nah sorry it seemed like nonsense to me too. Lives can be messy, but personalities are personalities, and most "messy"-ness of this kind is caused the perception that society demands something, and the desire to fit in with society. I don't, for one second, believe the Tenar would have married a random completely uninteresting farmer and had multiple kids with him. Sorry. No. Especially not when she wants us to believe that Tenar is still Tenar and still has her "real" personality later on.What it felt like to me was 20th-century projection, one of Le Guin's few failures to write the genuine character. Like, she's writing like it's 1950s to 1980s America, where a woman was raised with a very specific idea of her place in society and her duties to society, raised with the idea that she had to get married, had to have kids, had to live in domesticity, even if she went to university and was briefly allowed to learn something or the like. Tenar wasn't raised like that. She was raised in crazytown to be the priestess of a weird cult. She wasn't even exposed to ideas of domesticity and a woman's place and so on, and suddenly she wants to marry some nobody (and the book does some work to portray him as a nobody, note, I'm not just saying that for effect) and live like that until he dies? And then the moment he does she does a 180 again and she's Tenar again? It honestly felt fake as hell, like a much worse author's work.I mean you see this all the time in mediocre character writers - Brandon Sanderson can barely go a book without doing at least once on a smaller scale! It happens at least four or five times in the first three Stormlight Archive books, where the authorial hand-of-god reaches down and re-orients a character away from what their personality, history, established driving motivations and so on would do, and towards something the author either finds interesting or that fits with their dubious morality (often the latter with Sanderson, c.f. the horrible fairy telling Kaladin he can't overthrow the frankly Nazi-adjacent system of oppression because that kind of revolutionary action is just plain wrong!).And frankly, if Le Guin had put some effort in to really exploring the whys here, maybe it could have become more believable, but even then I'm skeptical. People who make huge life-direction-changes like that without social pressure and conditioning but also without a clear and considered rationale tend to be unstable and changeable and I don't think they'd stick around until someone died.In a sense it makes me think of Meursault in Camus' L'Etranger which is an amazing book but it basically comes out of a wholesale misunderstanding of autism, leading Camus to create this very strange internal life and way of thinking (some of which is quite representative of autism, and some of which is kind of wild/ridiculous and seems like he was trying to guess why someone might act like that), whereas this I think is someone from the 1960s (or 1970s or 1980s, I forget when the book is from) making assumptions about the life-changes she's seeing in people around her and making her character do the same things, but not really understanding why people are actually making those life changes or what kind of person makes those life changes, what prepares them to do them.Or I could be wrong... but I don't think I'm wholly wrong here.</blockquote>

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