This just smacks of a reason for Zoey to be happy she's never seeing her family again.
Everything else is pretty well covered, so I figured I'd pluck this to rant about. Never read this book series, but it's a general complaint that I have, and given how it seems to be presented here, seems like a good time to do this.
I know that the point of doing this is to give the characters a convenient excuse for not wanting to see their family -- Harry, for instance, was routinely bullied by the Dursleys and certainly had no desire to see them again -- but why don't people ever want to explore the relationship between the transformee and the family of the victim? This seems like it would be a really good source of characterization and tension, and so often it just gets glossed over in order to get to the 'good stuff'.
Which is a damn shame, because this is what I want to read about. I want to see the vampiric transformation (or whatever) and I want to see how the family reacts and adjusts, if they adjust at all, how they treat their daughter now that she's becoming something 'unnatural' but she's still their daughter, or sister, or whatever. Way the hell more interesting than some tepid teen romance about how hot the undead are and maybe there's some plot somewhere. Maybe.
(To be perfectly honest I would read an entire book just about the interaction between somebody who's being converted into a vampire/has been turned and their family. ...okay maybe a novella but you get the idea)
I have a feeling that this won't be rectified, if her family shows up so rarely as the books go on. Even the Dursleys, who are outright terrible people, got a lot of character development throughout Harry Potter, and Harry was still concerned enough to have them taken to a safe haven by the Order (and he even forms a truce with Dudley!) Somehow, I don't think we'll be seeing Zoey come to appreciate her family and realize how she's been mistreating them and blah. Wasted opportunity.
Although I don't know if the writers have the finesse to pull that off well; I seem to recall another summary of this book saying that the religious 'conflict' between her and her ultra-conservative family is displayed with the subtlety of a sledgehammer attached to a fire axe, so...
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Date: 2011-01-07 09:50 pm (UTC)Everything else is pretty well covered, so I figured I'd pluck this to rant about. Never read this book series, but it's a general complaint that I have, and given how it seems to be presented here, seems like a good time to do this.
I know that the point of doing this is to give the characters a convenient excuse for not wanting to see their family -- Harry, for instance, was routinely bullied by the Dursleys and certainly had no desire to see them again -- but why don't people ever want to explore the relationship between the transformee and the family of the victim? This seems like it would be a really good source of characterization and tension, and so often it just gets glossed over in order to get to the 'good stuff'.
Which is a damn shame, because this is what I want to read about. I want to see the vampiric transformation (or whatever) and I want to see how the family reacts and adjusts, if they adjust at all, how they treat their daughter now that she's becoming something 'unnatural' but she's still their daughter, or sister, or whatever. Way the hell more interesting than some tepid teen romance about how hot the undead are and maybe there's some plot somewhere. Maybe.
(To be perfectly honest I would read an entire book just about the interaction between somebody who's being converted into a vampire/has been turned and their family. ...okay maybe a novella but you get the idea)
I have a feeling that this won't be rectified, if her family shows up so rarely as the books go on. Even the Dursleys, who are outright terrible people, got a lot of character development throughout Harry Potter, and Harry was still concerned enough to have them taken to a safe haven by the Order (and he even forms a truce with Dudley!) Somehow, I don't think we'll be seeing Zoey come to appreciate her family and realize how she's been mistreating them and blah. Wasted opportunity.
Although I don't know if the writers have the finesse to pull that off well; I seem to recall another summary of this book saying that the religious 'conflict' between her and her ultra-conservative family is displayed with the subtlety of a sledgehammer attached to a fire axe, so...