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No, she's a literary character by Steven Brust whose original roots apparently lie in an old RPG campaign that Brust played way back. Possibly Empire of the Petal Throne but don't quote me on that. See https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Characters/Dragaera for character gist.

Is it, though? Do most people really fantasize about the power of being able to make educated guesses about the future? If so, wouldn't that make Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Second Foundation books power fantasies too? I do concede that at the point where Leto puts on the sand trout and...

Well I mean, earlier you were suggesting that Mario is really Vlad, but in Dzur Mario helps Vlad out as a favor IIRC to Aliera, by performing an assassination that Vlad considers impossibly difficult. So they can't be the same person. And Vlad has heard the rumors about Mario and Aliera: He...

We had a few pages of narrative from Aliera's perspective in Tiassa, and BTW Mario's involvement in the events of Dzur seem like pretty good evidence that Paarfi didn't fabricate Aliera's link to Mario.

I'm not so sure about that part. Pathfinder is a recent acquisition, and the protection isn't a 100% guarantee even against a mere Morganti weapon let alone a Great Weapon. But Aliera probably would claim to find soul destruction as ho-hum as regular death if not more so. “And otherwise we’ll...

P.S. A great Morrolan quote is: Around that time, his cousin Aliera came in, wearing her, what have you bothered me about this time? expression. Morrolan took Blackwand from where she rested against the table, buckled her on, and successfully resisted the temptation to use her on Aliera. It was...

I love your description of Vlad as an annoying little brother. Spot-on, you've verbalized what I could never put into words there. That must have made being rescued by Vlad in Issola even more annoying. Yeah, "Chaotic Evil" is my half-joking best guess at the original PC's D&D alignment, but I...

Good point! That was pretty cool. I would like to hear some of your other examples if you don't mind, just to refresh my memory and my fondness for the character. Edit: oh! I like how he spares Benedict despite fearing him.

That's fair. Corwin's not necessarily someone I like a lot, but I do know he likes to smoke, gets along with Random but not with Eric, is ruthless and willing to backstab Eric but ultimately fights to save Amber in a pinch, is far more tenacious and ambitious than I am, etc. When you say he's...

That's what I mean: I care about Anne Shirley et al. in a way Herbert never made me care about Duncan Idaho, et alia. I get the feeling Dune works best if you hate House Harkonnen, but... I barely notice they exist. To me, Dune reads more like a thought experiment than a story.

Yes, but for the record I don't think the flaws in the original are the fault of the medium. At the risk of stating the obvious, there's a multitude of characters in written fiction whom I do care about, from Big Dan and Little Anne to Anne Shirley to Corwin of Amber to Morrolan e'Drien and...

I'd go even further: there's a conspicuous lack of characters, period. The most entertaining parts of Herbert's writing are the appendices. I never cared at all about Gurney Halleck as an individual until I saw Josh Brolin portray him onscreen, and I never cared about Thufir Hawat until I saw...

My first thought in this scenario is to emphasize emotion: "You see three blood-spattered corpses lying on the floor, one of them with a rusty dagger through its eye socket. Between the corpses and you sit two sad-faced wolves licking each other's ears and faces. When they notice you come in...

Even in The Hobbit though it talks about their predilection for mechanical genius as a defining trait: Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they...

A valid point, although I am not aware of any Viking analogue for the orcish love of cunning metalwork and war machines. To me that screams "Nazi tanks!" more than longboats, even though of course the orcs didn't have anything remotely as sophisticated as a Panzer tank. But in D&D you totally...

Yes, the very tropes I've been objecting to all along here, like claiming that orcs represent BIPOC because of their skin color while ignoring salient traits that make orcs fantasy Nazis. When I was a kid I was very conscious of the way I looked, that it was different from other people, and...

Speculation: I think maybe what's going on is that nerds are very comfortable pushing back even about design changes they're not especially sensitive about. Like, if WotC mandates that all D&D 6E PCs are inherently ambidextrous (no right- or left-handed PCs), or that all PCs must have names...

I'm not pasty-white. I'm green (or brownish-green). And two of my grandparents were Filipino.

I like to imagine that the Endor battle was quite a bit bloodier and more serious than we see onscreen, and that the camera shows only the 1% of Ewoks who got freakishly lucky against the stormtroopers. That most engagements had heavy casualties on both sides, Ewoks and stormtroopers. I like the...

I'm not even sure they have value when societies are small. If you've got a group of eight people, and four of them are Bill's faction and the other four are Bob's faction, and they're both totally indifferent to the welfare of the other faction, that seems like a recipe for a blood feud. I...