...or, I thought maybe we should have a thread for the Black Company series, since @jacktrash has talked about them not having the fandom they deserve. I picked them up, mostly on his rec, and finished the first trilogy (Books of the North? I think?) a while back. Scattered thoughts below. Spoiler: spoilers through The White Rose Holy fuck these books are dark. I thought A Song of Ice and Fire had inured me to gritty medieval fantasy, but the Black Company is mostly about a mercenary company who spend a long time working for, basically, Sauron's estranged wife who got the evil empire in the divorce. They would be The Bad Guys in a series where that was a meaningful term. But this isn't a story where there are Bad Guys and Good Guys -- half the Rebel leaders are as corrupt and power-hungry as any of the Lady's Taken. This made it an interesting read as compared to a lot of high fantasy, but also jarring as hell. Croaker is a difficult protagonist to sympathize with when he's dispassionately watching his buddies rape and pillage. I did come to love a lot of the characters in spite of that. By the last book, the Lady had gone from a distant and terrifying figure to a woman terribly isolated by her enormous power, still pursuing more power to achieve her goals. Darling, too, was amazing -- if anything I wish we'd gotten more of a perspective from her, I'd have loved to know how she thought of her role in the war, what she hoped for, what she feared (although I think by the end she feared almost nothing). And who can forget One-Eye and Goblin? Raven deserves a bullet point of his own. I've got mixed feelings about how Cook handles characterization, but I think he was really deft in what he did with Raven. You keep wanting to think Raven is a better person than the rest of the Company, and you keep getting that rug pulled out from under your feet. He's a massive hypocrite who does terrible things for Darling's sake without concern for what she thinks about it (which she calls him out for eventually). Also, pretty much every book so far can be summed up as follows: EVERYONE: Raven don't do the thing RAVEN: *does the thing* SHIT: *gets fucked up* EVERYONE: DAMMIT RAVEN RAVEN: haha whoops RAVEN: *fakes his death and runs away* Glen Cook doesn't hold your hand through the plot. This makes sense, given that all his main characters including the POV character are basically grunts and foot soldiers. They don't know much about magic or the thousand-year chess game between the Dominator and his Lady. What's Toadkiller Dog? What are the dwellers in the castle? Who made the Plain of Fear, exactly? They're just one of those things. Keep your head down and follow orders and leave the philosophy to the scary undead bastards slinging fireballs. However, this does make these books hard to follow at times, which is frustrating. I still don't know what the hell went down at the end of The White Rose, or how the Lady knew Darling's name, or how Silent knew the Lady's when the rest of the Company wizards didn't. (Though I name your true name, Tonie Fisk made me gasp out loud when I read it, no word of a lie.) Have to re-read at some point. Also: These books are hard to find! Most libraries only have a couple of the later volumes out of order. Bookstores ditto. I still don't own the second or third, and I think my friends had to order the first off Amazon.
I absolutely fucking love these and need to reread them. Cook is a Vietnam veteran, and I think that's very obvious in his depiction of army life, even in a mercenary company. The soldiers play cards constantly, because most of war is sitting on your arse waiting for horrible things to occur. They play pranks, sometimes dangerous ones. They conspire. They get bored. They do stupid things. They find contraband.
the lady is such a vriska. i am half convinced she was an inspiration for vriska in fact -- that and the ancestors' titles being so similar to the taken's titles makes me really wonder if hussie has read the black company. as for finding them, the individual volumes are hard to find because the collected volumes are where it's at. also if you're into audiobooks, the audible.com versions are pretty great. especially the reader they have for the stories where the lady is narrating, she does that ruthless voice SO WELL.
I still regret not picking up that collected volume of the first trilogy I found in a used bookstore in Ashland. I figured "I already own the first book, I should just buy the other two!" Never mind that I could have sold or given away the first book, or that the collected volume used probably cost less than Shadows Linger and The White Rose new and combined... ETA: I do not even live in Oregon. Online ordering might be my best bet at this point.
I was going to say I thought the Lady was more Meenah and Soultaker was more Vriska, and then I realised, actually, ALL the Taken are Vriska. Every one of them. Entire team is Vriskas.
And the reason they didn't lose quickly was that until Darling came along, the enemy was about the same.
This is actually really funny, because the path that led me to this site basically started with me desperately searching for Black Company fanfic (there is so, so little) and finding one that I think was written by @jacktrash which was a homestuck fusion, and that led me to his tumblr, which eventually led me to seebs' tumblr, which got me here. I really love the Black Company series, they hold a special place in my heart. The Taken are some of my favorite Generic Evil Minions, mostly because they're always talked up as being great and powerful and then swiftly and unceremoniously killed off by each other offscreen. Also, I don't know how Lady knew Darling's True Name, but I'm guessing a lot of research. However, I'm pretty sure that Silent knew Lady's through pure process of elimination, because they'd figured out that Lady was one of the four Senjak's, that Soulcatcher was another, and the Dominator tried to use her true name on her twice with different ones and failed.
