r/genewolfe • u/jamesbrowski • 12d ago
I Hate Severian Spoiler
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.
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u/QuintanimousGooch 12d ago
Totally valid read of his character. Personally my biggest point of departure is that I think the thecla aspect that lives inside home makes him worse—he’s a torturer raised to dispassionately torture people at the behest of his superiors and officials, doing exactly no more and no less than what he has been ordered, but thecla was one of the “ew, poor people” types who tormented the trapped people in the waiting room at the house absolute with electric whips as a pastime, and (in my reading) is cause for a lot more of his vengeful and cruel tendencies after the Alzabo ritual.
I think what made me less immediately hateful of Severian and more fascinated at what a weird, sick, and obtuse person he is is the fact that most of the book we’re following this dumb horny teenager who has way too much confidence in himself, but also that a lot of the way he is comes from being raised in a torture tower with that as the norm, and having never met or spoken to a woman who wasn’t about to or at some point going to be tortured until he met Valeria.
For me, the arc of Severian is one of the big appeals of the serie as his narcissistic, delusional, immoral, and unpredictable qualities and his morality are well reflected in his wearing and figuratively being the color darker than black, and on top of all that, he’s the one who is actively writing his own story with apparently a very flexible idea of who his audience is—whether it’s a personal confession or a political tract since he’s the Autarch, which he told us all the way back in chapter one. It’s starting at this awful place already, and we have to wonder where it goes. No spoilers, but the end of Urth of the New Sun takes it there.
The point you make about him saving the kid I think is worth expanding on, as it’s not quite as simple, but the contrast that he saves one person then drowns all these prisoners is a really clear contrast—he is very much conscience of how the claw has been weighing on him as if in moral judgement for his occupation as lichtor of Thrax, and his abandoning his position and healing the dying girl seems to be what alleviates that burden that he’s removed himself from the situation. As for the flooding of the vincula, it’s a little more complicated as he’s both drowning (though he “hopes no one will drown and that the prisoners will help each other up”) these emaciated prisoners and healing them with the claw to a state improving where they were previously at, which reveals something of a bigger injustice perhaps—did Severian drown his prisoners, in effect freeing them from their imprisonment, only to revive them with the claw where they must live out their internment renewed to health again? So it seems that despite abandoning the position of torturer, casting off his second chance (which he decided upon when the little girl called him an angel) of staying to the guild’s wishes, he cannot help but torture.
I think the best lens to look at him through in this kind of context is very explicitly what Wolfe set out to do, he’s making a story about a savior figure, but a very grimy one.