I don’t know if I’d say “hate”, but my main qualm with the series is a side-effect of everyone’s (including mine) favourite thing about it. 

The same tone that makes the series so funny and snappy and deliciously action-packed sometimes shields the series from looking too hard at itself and becoming sentimental or retrospective or philosophical. 

And don’t get me wrong, I love that almost all of the time. Skulduggery Pleasant is one of the few action-driven (as opposed to emotion- or character- driven) stories I have ever enjoyed! And I enjoy it a lot! It even does glorify and violence a bit, and I don’t even mind that, because it’s so interesting and fun to see some of the same goofy unrepentant tones often found in video games and comics aimed at eleven-year-old boys in a series about an eleven-year-old girl. It’s kind of wonderfully neat to me that Stephanie gets to be the same kind of unapologetically punch-now-ask-questions-later protagonist that is more commonly found in male leads. And yet I do feel like the series does this without ignoring the fact that she’s a girl. So that’s awesome. 

That being said, sometimes I wish the series would pause for minute to really look into some of the crap that Stephanie and others go through. Sometimes I do want the series to pull a Harry Potter and dedicate an entire chapter to a character crying and asking the universe why and pounding the floor. The bad moments are always given a nod, and it’s not like the characters act in a way that is too unbelievable, but SP has lots of moments that in another book series would have made me all out sob, but in this series just makes me a little emotional. And I think that’s because the series can shy away from overpowering emotion a bit too much. I kind of wish it would give in to it every once in a while. 

1. teabooksandhotchicks likes this
2. timemachineyeah posted this