It’s a snowy Sunday of a long holiday weekend, and we are enjoying the comforts of home. We had wanted to go to the movie theater yesterday to see the live simulcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Fedora, but alas, with the icy roads, we decided to wait until it comes to the Met’s streaming service in a few months and watch it at home.
So what did we do instead? Well, we tried out our new snow blower (it is awesome!), and we did a couple loads of laundry, but we assume folks aren’t interested in our delicates. We also watched the new season of Vikings: Valhalla, and since I discussed S1, some of you might actually be interested in my thoughts on the latest adventures of a bunch of pretty Vikings running around doing crazy stuff. (If not, skip to the end for some publishing news!)
My major complaint about S1 is the bad habit of the greater Vikings TV universe to skip the scenes you actually want to see. That, unsurprisingly, happens again in S2. One of the most annoying also aids in turning a favorite character into someone else. Without getting into too many spoilery details, Harald Sigurdsson (IRL best known as Harald Hardrada to the history buffs in the crowd) in S1 is handsome and charming and has the gift of being able to talk just about anyone into doing just about anything. In S2, to borrow the terminology I see most frequently applied to him on Tumblr, he’s become a himbo. Yes, he’s still handsome, but instead of being incredibly clever and persuasive, he’s kind of a brutish dumbass. There are lots of scenes of him beating people up, but when he needs to convince folks to help him, he’s kind of incompetent, and the one time he succeeds in winning someone over and financially backing him, the audience is told about it after the fact and it’s not shown.
This is just one example of the show’s example of skipping the important scene. (Like last season, we once again get a couple of very powerful people in bed together without seeing the moment they decide to sleep together and instead jumping to them naked and chatting after.) There are also several moments of characters being conveniently stupid or incompetent (or overly competent) for the sake of the plot. This has always happened in this universe, but if you aren’t feeling particularly invested in the plot and all you have to cling to are your favorite characters, then when they behave out of character for the sake of the bad plot, it’s especially frustrating.
On the upside, the last episode was the strongest of the season, so I wasn’t left with a completely bad taste in my mouth. Which means I’ll tune in for S3, in which I sincerely hope we get more Canute. (Seriously, giving him something like 5 minutes total airtime scattered through the last 3 episodes is not enough for the most charismatic actor on the show. I sincerely hope his absence was a matter of the actor being in demand because he’s so good and not that the writers couldn’t come up with something interesting for him to do.) The other big question J and I have been asking ourselves is will there eventually be a big time jump (original Vikings did this), because the show spends a fair amount of time in S2 setting up 1066, even though that’s decades away.
Anyhow, enough Vikings. (Although, if you want to read about Vikings, let me take a moment to recommend once again The Wolf Age. OK. Now I’m really done.) We have actual publishing news! Last night we uploaded our next novel, When You Are King, to Draft2Digital! If you follow our self-publishing process, you might remember it takes a few days for new books to roll out to all the online stores so that you can place preorders, but it will pop up soon if you want to hang onto this handy link. We are also hoping before the month is out to have For Her Own Good available in paperback! You will definitely want to watch this space for that.
And that’s all for us on this snowy day.
~S
J.S. Mawdsley 
I hate when characters completely change their personality like that! It usually happens between seasons, or between books. That’s why I write all my books back to back when I’m doing a series. A long wait makes it hard to channel your characters again.
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It can be SO hard to get the voice back. We’re constantly rereading when we return to characters. But for us, it’s a matter of trying to find what worked again. I think 9 times out of 10 what happens on TV in between seasons is a convo in the writers room about how the characters can be bigger, better, and more awesome in the next season, previous development be damned.
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