Do you know the talking point they wouldn’t write a novel like that these days? Well, I am glad that certain novels wouldn’t look as they do if they were published today. If there is a naive fantasy novel about a cheeky princess and a novel about a prince turned murderer and rapist, I choose the cheeky princess genre. Maybe I’m a soy-girl snowflake. Or maybe I’ve read enough novels to see that Mark Lawrence failed to create a likeable and identifiable villain protagonist/antihero.
I can’t see why “Prince of Thorns” used to be so popular. Or rather, I’m so much beyond my ASoIaF era that I can’t imagine anymore how people used to like such things. Back then, ruthless and violent protagonists were considered “gritty” and “realistic”. Rape was thought to be the only form of violence that women would have experienced in a quasi-medieval society. This way, I think, books like “Prince of Thorns” emerged.
Just to be clear; I’ve read books with anti-hero or villain protagonists. I’ve read books in which we were supposed to sympathise with a hero whose actions were simply unethical. But no one is as bad, and no one’s redeeming qualities are as unconvincing as in the case of Jorg Ancrath, the “Prince of Thorns” protagonist. Tyrion Lannister? Even Theon Greyjoy? They are all better than him. Anyone is better than him. And anyone’s reasons are better than his’. “They killed his Mum and Bro” isn’t enough to justify someone that you, as a reader, wish to kill with a laser gun/burning pan/another deadly instrument.
The next terrible aspect is that I had no reason to expect that it would be so bad. Recently, I’ve read Scott Lynch’s books, and despite their shortcomings, they are pretty fine in their attitudes. They also belong to the “contemporary fantasy classic written by a guy” genre, and they are so much different. There is no Madonna/whore dichotomy there. There is no excuse or sympathy for rapists. Locke and Jean do violent and illegal things, but they are never cruel or abusive. They lose their parents too. They live in a brutal, poverty-stricken world. And yet, they don’t behave like Jorg. Moreover, it seems to me that Scott Lynch would have never intentioned for them to behave like him.
If the protagonist is so off-putting that you aren’t going to read anything more in the series despite an interesting post apo backdrop, know that a novel impressed me badly. Yes, I would have given this setting a chance. Even with tokenistic PoC characters. Even with gross inconsistencies – there are so many quasi-medieval references in the book, and the Pope is politically important again, it seems, but your postapocalyptic France sounds like… England, of course. I wouldn’t have minded. But what I couldn’t ignore was a protagonist behaving like a piece of sh*t.
Am I mean? The book was mean to me; I just pay it back.
Left Hand of Fiction 