Wednesday, September 11, 2013

Laura

Sympathies for Laura?

Did your version get into why she was behind the robbery that led to Shadow's imprisonment?

I thought her line about coming into a room and not knowing whether Shadow was there seemed to hurt him more than her betrayal before her death.
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6 comments:

kc said...

No, I don't think the robbery thing was very clear. And it seemed incongruous with their characters, to me. It kind of just seemed like the author needed a reason for Shadow to be in prison, so he randomly latched onto that, unless I'm missing something. It seemed like, to preserve Shadow's good character, he had to make up some he-did-it-for-the-woman crime, and it just rang hollow.

I felt a lot of sympathy for Laura, even though she made some bad choices. She seemed very human to me, and I appreciated the complexity of Shadow's feelings for her even after the betrayal. That also seemed very realistic — but not the way that a lot of male writers would have handled that.

2:18 PM, September 12, 2013
cl said...

I didn't think the robbery storyline fell together easily, either. Perhaps it was to give Laura some morally ambiguous background to her dying act. And yeah, to put Shadow in prison seemed kind of a hasty process.

Agreed on the complexity. For some reason I liked her following him around the protect him. And trying to find some degree of normalcy — working at a convenience shop.

When he takes the coin back and she passes, that made me emotional. An act of kindness but finality, too. He spends some much invested in this world where the impossible does happen, so, could he just have his wife back? Can't there be a god for that some kind of hocus pocus he sees around him? So it was like a second loss to let her go. And Gaiman dodges the easy, happy ending. I think that was the right thing to do.

4:53 PM, September 12, 2013
cl said...

Pardon the typos!

4:54 PM, September 12, 2013
kc said...

Good point about the coin offer. There was a sense of no going back once you know what you know.

I thought it was such a good idea to have her appear as a corpse rather than as a more lifelike ghost or something. It was a constant reminder that she was in fact dead but also a constant prod to think about what it means for someone to be alive and wholly with us. You see a decaying shell of someone and you start thinking hard about the intangibles — the "spirit," the animating force that makes a person's eyes look alive, the inner forces that drive their smiles and the way they move, the gazillion things that make an individual an individual and that all evaporate at the moment of death.

7:40 PM, September 12, 2013
Erin said...

Yeah, I liked the idea of the animated corpse -- a zombie à la "Walking Dead" but with personality intact.

Laura was quite a tragic figure. She was sacrificed, essentially, by Wednesday to manipulate Shadow and advance the plan for war. I love that she didn't take it lying down. That she didn't let her shame keep her from pursuing Shadow and trying to help him.

Agreed on the robbery. It didn't make much sense to me in the context of the story, but then I thought maybe that was OK if it was all orchestrated by Wednesday anyway.

11:35 AM, September 17, 2013
cl said...

Good point, Erin. I forgot Laura was a sacrificial lamb in the story.

4:10 PM, September 18, 2013

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