The Eternal Knot - Dragon Novella

By Tonbo Karasu, in L5R LCG: Lore Discussion

2 hours ago, Tonbo Karasu said:

Well, _we_ know that, but your average samurai doesn't.

Sounds like even your average ise Zuma (if there is such a thing) doesn't.

Is there any word why this book didn't make it to Drivethru RPG like the first 3 novels. I am catching up with the fiction now and just reached the point where this should be the next story for me to read.

But I can't find it on DriveThruRPG where I bought the first 3.

I see that it is available on Amazon, but since I don't have a kindle and don't live in the U.S., so between buying a hard copy and shipping I would be paying 6-10x as much as I did the first three novels.

2 hours ago, TheHobgoblyn said:

Is there any word why this book didn't make it to Drivethru RPG like the first 3 novels. I am catching up with the fiction now and just reached the point where this should be the next story for me to read.

But I can't find it on DriveThruRPG where I bought the first 3.

I see that it is available on Amazon, but since I don't have a kindle and don't live in the U.S., so between buying a hard copy and shipping I would be paying 6-10x as much as I did the first three novels.

It's on DriveThruFiction.com instead.
https://www.drivethrufiction.com/product/298315/Legend-of-the-Five-Rings-The-Eternal-Knot?src=hottest_filtered

It took me a week to get around to finishing this one.

I think I didn't like this one nearly as much as the previous ones. The Scorpion and Unicorn felt like they had larger casts of characters, or at least more variation of characters, and a larger scope. The Phoenix one didn't have all that many characters, and all were from the Phoenix clan, but at least they were all from different families which meant that as much as they fit the stereotypes of those families-- there were different kinds of characters. I think they all had quite a lot more tension, intensity and action.

But here we had only Togashi Ise Zumi and they didn't do much at all and all of that nothing was being done in a couple very barren and uninteresting locations. A good half of it could be just simply described as "Kazue wanders around aimlessly with no idea what to do next." And the fake-out ending was totally unnecessary-- more and more we have characters talking about sepukku or other sorts of self-destruction when ultimately, due to drama and common sense, protagonists in these stories are going to fail over and over and over again and none are ever going to resort to that, bringing it up again and again as though any sort of failure or lapse in judgement is going to cause people to resort to that is just going to ring more and more hollow-- make it more and more obvious that named characters have super thick plot armor.

This is particularly the case since the reality is that it was only ever done as a way to get prisoners or potential traitors to execute themselves (lest they be executed in a far more painful and gruesome way and their body defiled), or done by those who were fearful of being captured and a couple times in protest of having been ordered to or forced to carry out what amounts to a war crime. Basically, if one looks at when it was ever done historically, it was basically only times when it would be pretty understandable that anyone would off themselves. Making suicide into some sort of ritual was just a way of making it sound like it was all full of machismo than admitting it for what it was.

This whole "we do anything but flawlessly succeed in every endeavor and always find victory and never make a mistake, or we'll run ourselves through!" is a super toxic orientalism that the setting would do best to just as it abandon it. At least the whole "we resolve every little disagreement through sword fights to the death and that determines who is right" has at least been minimized to a great degree, but it stands out as the other "this isn't how the world works and, if it did, the Great Clans wouldn't have lasted even 200 years let alone 1000". It is never going to be how the setting is actually going to function as far as characters we get introduced to and see the world through the eyes of are ever going to behave, so just stop mentioning it, stop teasing it, just stop acting like it is a thing when it is super obvious a couple years in that it is not and is never going to be outside of possibly unnamed mooks and some very extreme case when a character's story is over and it seems the best way to write them off.

Out of the 4 books I have read so far, this has definitely the worst one even if it were not for that bad ending. Was it interesting to find out about Togashi's link to the tattoos? Sure. Is Senzai a potentially interesting character? Yes. Are there story potentials for Kazue's power? Absolutely-- perhaps far too much so as she can just utterly destroy or redeem characters in seconds but with a thought, it might be one of those "we gave a character an ability that is so plot-breaking that it's going to be a massive plothole every time she fails to use it or those who know about her fail to summon her to be able to use it."

But that's a handful of things contained within less than 20% of the book.

And I don't think this is the writer's fault. The writing style is all fine. Actually, it is odd just how consistent the writing style is across the 4 books I have read so far given they all have different authors. It seems there are some strict rules about how to present things and refer to things within the Rokugan setting, so 4 different authors end up speaking with what sounds like a single consistent voice and tone. If it weren't for the author names being printed on the front covers, I would have easily mistaken that they were all written by one person.

But I feel like the story outline she was given just didn't contain nearly enough to work with to fill out a full 107 page story. So instead of feeling like a story where the events, plots and interactions required the full length of a book, it felt like we were getting an account of a bunch of the boring minutia that generally happen between the events covered in the fictions that would normally be summarized in a couple sentences. Just a bunch of filler to bulk out a story that didn't have much to say.

I hope that this one will stand out as just a low point for the series and not what we will get in the future. The first three were all so very good and it has everything with the amount of characters and events, the amount of substance there was to the story-- which I have to think was simply assigned to the author rather than it being the story they were dying to tell.

Edited by TheHobgoblyn