[GreenMonkey]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

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.

Agreed. The date of writing does kinda figure into the feel IMO.

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).
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* 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.

Ehh, it's Lackey's style. Terry Brooks has a recurring thing for magic seducing people into evil. GRR Martin has a thing for making the heroes suffer (or killing people outright). I think most authors have a style of some sort, and Lackey certainly likes a certain kind of villain and has a certain idea of what evil is.