[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by wyndslash

i've been considering Lackey's work as well, but I read a comment back then about how the series was disturbing and was in nature, very homophobic. so i'm still thinking about it...

I wouldn't call them homophobic per se, but they written from an 80s US perspective of gayness as seen from the viewpoint of a well-meaning but moderately insulated middle-class heterosexual middle American woman who still lives in the heart of the so-called Bible Belt, which, if some very depressing news reports are to be believed, tends not to have progressed very much acceptance-wise in the intervening decades.

So they do end up being very, very angsty as the protagonist spends a lot of time being self-loathing and whiny due to the pressures of Being Different In A Mostly Intolerant Society* until he Comes To Terms With Who He Is (and some of the more intolerant people to whom he's attached get some sense beaten into them).

And they were kind of one of the first mainstream-published fantasy novels to even have openly gay main characters being openly gay and having relationships (instead of chastely dead or predatorily villainous, which I've read was kind of the cliché norm until then) and thus kind of end up Setting An Example for tolerance and acceptance, so if it seems like they harp on certain issues, that's probably why.

Possibly one of Lackey's other works would be better off to start off with to try (although LHM is kind of key to underpinning much of the Valdemar mythos and a big chunk of it will make less sense if you haven't read them).

I'll warn you that her books can be disturbing due to her other regular writing tropes (tendency to linger on self-justifying rants from the villainous viewpoint just to show how vile they are, annoying use of Funetically Speilt Aksent to denote dialect speech, female characters having to struggle against depressing amounts of misogyny to accomplish stuff, future heroic characters being bullied by especially cruel and sadistic bullies before they wind up Showing Them All, attempted rape/torture to imbue that historically-accurate faux-medievalish ceci n'est pas un Renaissance Faire theme park flavour).

There are some of her books available as promotionally freebies in the Baen Free Library and on the Baen CD-ROMs at the Fifth Imperium site which has permission to distribute them.

I think that The Lark and the Wren is probably the closest in tone to the Last Herald-Mage books, as far as the wangsting protagonist struggling and eventually triumphing over her intolerant and unsupportive culture thing goes, and Born to Run as far as the disturbing content regarding physical/emotional abuse goes. If either one of those goes over the top for your reading tastes, then you should probably skip LHM entirely unless you're really morbidly curious.

Actually, I think you'd probably like Knight of Ghosts and Shadows best. It's actually pretty upbeat for a Lackey book and there's fairly strong relationship which plays with a love triangle turning into a threesome the characters involved find out that they can find each other attractive regardless of gender. You might also be interested in a free short story set in the same world by another author in the anthology Bedlam's Edge, about an elven/human gay couple.

* This, incidentally, is a trope that applies to practically all Lackey hero/heroines, regardless of sexual orientation, so it's not like it's something she reserved in particular for Vanyel.