I Read What?!

Oh, hooray! It's one of Drizzt's pompous interludes! It's a good thing for me, because I'm incredibly lazy. It's a bad thing though, because I have to listen to Drizzt talk.



Honestly, the entry is pretty much just a summary of the story so far. Drizzt, after leaving Menzzoberranzan, was focused on survival but had been so deprived of human contact (for lack of a better phrase) that he was losing himself in the meantime.

Blingdenstone, on the other hand, was pretty awesome:

The svirfnebli of Blingdenstone showed me a different way. Svirfneblin society, structured and nurtured on communal values and unity, proved to be everything that I had always hoped Menzoberranzan would be. The svirfnebli did much more than merely survive. They lived and laughed and worked, and the gains they made were shared by the whole, as was the pain of the losses they inevitably suffered in the hostile subsurface world.

I excerpted this bit, because I do think that Blingdenstone and the svirnebli were very important for Drizzt's development. And it's part of what ends up saving him from Zaknafein's fate. Part of it was temperament, of course. The cross-parry metaphor, and all that. Drizzt is not a man who can be content with a stalemate or passivity.

But I think there's more to it too. Zaknafein stayed in Menzoberranzan because he couldn't conceive of going somewhere else. He may never have known that there was something better out there. "This is wrong" is one realization, but it doesn't necessarily come hand-to-hand with "I can find something right."

And we saw what the lack of hope or purpose did to Drizzt over ten years. He could have gone to the surface at any point in the last ten years, (and we know he will eventually), but why would he, when he doesn't know if it will really be any better for him?

But Blingdenstone proved that there are better things out there. There are societies whose values are closer to Drizzt's own, filled with people who are kind and empathetic, where even the adversarial authority figures act to protect their people rather than out of malicious cruelty. It's fact rather than an imagining. And I think that really is a big deal.

And of course, Drizzt's not alone now. He has a traveling companion that doesn't have to spend days on the Astral Plane. So things are promising indeed.

I can't wait to see it go to Hell for the poor guy.