#screaming into the void to blow off some steam snd getting worked up over an old book series

[curious-sootball]

One of many, many weird things in the Legends that annoyed me a lot: the arc cannot decide who is supposed to be its main antagonist.

Think about it: we have Lord Arrin and Penryck as main antagonists for the first and second book (The first collier and The coming of Hoole); they kick most of the arc's plot into action (Hoole wouldn't have ended up in Grank's care if H'rath and Siv were alive and not forced into hiding) and are set up as a more or less believable threat; but they pretty much dissolve into nothing at the beginning of "To be a King" – it is mentioned that they had one too many arguments and went their separate ways, but we get little to no details about it. Those two were the greatest threat the protagonists had to face, or at least framed as such for two books! Nah, they can just fade into background, no need to worry about them.

To be fair, Kreeth gets actively mentioned in "The coming of Hoole" and even shows up in person; she ends up as the final boss main antagonist of the "To be a King", and boi, she had some legitimately scary takeover schemes (she is said to be a very powerful spellcaster, and she planned to get her claws onto the most powerful magical item in the setting by forcing Lutta to impersonate Emerilla, a girl from a noble owl family, and either steal the Ember or become Hoole's queen and steal the ember slightly later.)

Problem is, this wasn't a "greater scope antagonist taking out the initial one" situation, like with st. Aegolius and the pure ones (who infiltrated the place from the inside and massacred basically everyone later in the books to take over the resources and living space in the books); the only connection between the antagonists of the first two books and Kreeth is Ygryk and her husband. Instead of "greater scope threat taking out the initial one" we get a "one threat more or less gradually replaces the other". Changing focus from one antagonist to another is not inherently bad, but doing this without any meaningful resolution to the previous antagonist's arc is infuriating. They weren't some random marauders stirring up trouble, they killed the high king! The guy established as a very big deal in-universe, you know? Plus, they had plans to conquer the rest of Northern kingdoms, (and probably could pull that off) but this apparently doesn't matter because we have another person who also wants to take over the world, but with a slightly different flavour! Bruh.

Plus, there is a writing descision that I really don't like about this arc: every hagsfiend with some screentime is portrayed as a scheming, power-hungry, unrepentantly evil creature. Disturbing real-world parallels aside, did Lasky expect her readers to swallow a storybook villain without any questions after nine books of comparatively complex antagonists? Our very first proper antagonistic character in the books is aunt Finny – manipulative caretaker with a taste for owl eggs and chicks. "Har har har, I want to take over and rule the world, and literally do next to nothing outside this" is an undeniable downgrade :/