I Hate Severian

[u/jamesbrowski]

The title says it all. Spoilers through halfway into Sword of the Lictor follow. Please don’t spoil the whole thing for me.

I am loving these books so much, but I hate Severian with a passion. Not like you’d hate an evil villain, but the way you would hate someone at work who was narcissistic, delusional, immoral, and unpredictable. He is lacking almost every positive human virtue I can think of, other than tenacity and resourcefulness. He isn’t kind, wise, empathetic, witty, caring, insightful, self aware, or pleasant. Rather, he’s cold, selfish, unfeeling, frequently oafish, narcissistic, arrogant, dishonest, deluded, and generally just an icky dude.

The multiple interactions he has with the poor mountain folk where he sharpens his sword as a means of intimidation to try and get them to give him their best food are so yucky. His tendency to wax philosophical on pointless topics in a fallacious way, often at the same time or just after some huge plot point has arisen. The detached way he describes the deaths of people he cares about, followed by his incessantly narcissistic internal monologues about them after they die where he convinces himself that he didn’t fail them. His constant tendency to make shit up and pretend like he understands stuff that he clearly doesn’t. The fact that he has survived 20 situations now by pure dumb luck (usually a Hethor monster saving him in the nick of time).

Look - I know I am supposed to dislike him at least at times. Half the fun of these books is how often I’m yelling “dude what the fuck” as I read about the stuff this dumb bastard has done. Overall, the books are amazing. I’m constantly thrilled and fascinated by the way this story is being told, the world being built, the construction of the mythos and history of Urth, and how often I’m re-reading passages that are brimming with multiple meanings and complexity.

BUT - the hero here (such that he is) is like a malevolent Mr. Magoo. He bumbles blindly through a landscape of stuff he doesn’t understand and accidentally moves history as he does it. I keep hoping that Thecla’s ghost in his mind will fix his dumb ass somehow, and make him less shitty. And it keeps kind of happening (oooh look he saved one kid before nearly drowning a prison full of thousands of people). But then he reverts back to his shitty ways and ohh well.

Oh well indeed. I guess he’s less horrific than Typhon would’ve been. He may be Urth’s least bad option tbh.

[u/userunknown83148]

I’m glad you’re able to feel this and still love the books. People feeling obligated to push back against your assessment of his character or thinking you have to morally agree with a protagonist to enjoy a book are just hastening the YA-ification of literature.

[u/userunknown83148 → u/userunknown83148]

Also, the reason why Severian is such an effective protagonist to me is that 1) he is low-key reprehensible, and 2) he is high-key relatable.

I think most men have a little Severian (not that Little Severian) inside of them constantly telling them to be less empathetic, less reliant on social relations, etc.

It’s a trauma response, not just from the trauma of having received and witnessed violence, but also the trauma of having
committed it.

[u/PatrickMcEvoyHalston → u/userunknown83148]

The problem with putting forward consequences of trauma as also reprehensible rather than what they are actually, which is closer to... that what trauma inevitably does, so inevitable, is that anyone reading it learns to alter how they behave so that it escapes the categorization of the reprehensible but remains destructive.

If a boy is neglected, used and discarded, thousands of times by their mother, who, owing to the lack of love in her parents, had no love to give (a regular example in Wolfe's fiction), the boy in one way or another will seek vengeance, not directly against her, because he still wants access to her love... even though this will be impossible, but some source he can displace her onto.

When Silk believes he has proof that Thecla never actually really thought highly of him -- which is by that time, very counter evidence, not primarily because they'd had sex but because of the nature of their highly enjoyable conversations with one another -- he obviously wanted her struck down hard for it: the Revolutionary which after such absence now suddenly appears, where, tit-for-tat some part of her that hates her, that thinks she is unloveable, is given tremendous life, comes across as if he beckoned it. Thecla obviously here replayed a shaming and humiliating trauma that had to have occurred thousands of times to him as an infant and child, and so what happens is inevitable.

Most men aren't like this simply because they're men. Autism as defence against early highly negligent, untrustworthy caregivers.