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Thursday, November 29, 2007

Liir

Wikipedia:
Liir is a boy who leaves the mauntery with Elphaba for the Vinkus. It is strongly implied that Liir is the son of Elphaba and Fiyero. She does indeed admit that there is a year of her life she does not remember, during which she could have bore Liir. Extremely chubby, Liir played with his supposed half-siblings while he and his mother stayed with Fiyero's widow. He is also the protagonist of Maguire's sequel to Wicked, Son of a Witch In Son of a Witch, Liir gets Candle pregnant and she has a green baby. This proves once and for all that Liir is Elphaba's son. Gregory Maguire has described Liir as "Elphaba's son" in interviews.

Me:
He is Elphaba's son, and he would be the connection to any kind of a sequel, but I think that his role should be very much in the background, and we should spend much more time introducing Elphaba's pets than Liir. He should just be there by her side, almost like a familiar, and she should never call him 'son' or be motherly at all. The audience should be able to figure out that he is her son, but end up being surprised at how little they care about him. Now, I haven't read Son of a Witch yet, and so I do not know how much this has to do with it, but I cold guess that since we didn't get a whole lot of characterization of Liir in the first book we didn't really care as much about him in the second book. This may have contributed to why it did not receive the rave reviews of the first. Perhaps a bit more time should be spent on him, or perhaps creating a sense of mystery about him with many open ended questions to create suspense and desire to see a sequel featuring the boy. I would need to read the second book to really decide on what his role should be.

1 comment:

Caroly said...

I, like you, have not read Son of a Witch, so I guess I can't talk about Liir like I know him, however I don't like him that much knowing his role in the first book. When he was a child, he was a wimp. Then, after the skip to when he was 14 years old, his role was unclear.