Ranking each part of the CONDOR HEROES TRILOGY from lightest to darkest?

[Ken Cheng]

If you were to rank the three component stories of the CONDOR HEROES TRILOGY (LOCH, ROCH, HSDS) from lightest to darkest in overall tone and content, how would they line up?

[pannonian]

Light
...
Dark

ROCH
LOCH
HSDS

[tape]

Hrm strange you rank it that way.

ROCH is the only one that really deals with emotions and conflicts, so to me it is the only one that could be considered dark. LOCH and HSDS just felt like typical adventure stories where events drove the action and there wasn't too much depth to it.

[yangguo_]

Light
...
Dark

HSDS
ROCH
LOCH

[Ken Cheng]

Hrm strange you rank it that way.

ROCH is the only one that really deals with emotions and conflicts, so to me it is the only one that could be considered dark. LOCH and HSDS just felt like typical adventure stories where events drove the action and there wasn't too much depth to it.

Of the three, however, ROCH is the only one that ends on an indisputably positive note. Both LOCH and HSDS end with so much left unresolved.

[yangguo_]

I thought you were talking about overall tone
LOHC was darkest in my opinion, with yang kang, oyf, oyk, lots of tragedies.
HSDS was the lightest because I just didn't really feel any dark tones except for maybe the whole ZZR and her teacher thing.

[Doc Kwok]

I thought you were talking about overall tone
LOHC was darkest in my opinion, with yang kang, oyf, oyk, lots of tragedies.
HSDS was the lightest because I just didn't really feel any dark tones except for maybe the whole ZZR and her teacher thing.

I felt that HSDS was the darkest because in it, everything achieved by the heroes in the previous two novels essentially gets undone. The country had fallen. Their direct descendants became petty and selfish, squabbling amongst themselves for scraps of individual power and prestige rather than cooperate to help the country (as in ROCH). Even when forced to come together, they turned out to be too undisciplined and disorganised to amount for much. Their legacy in the form of the two weapons turned out to be pretty useless except for inciting even more strife. And even with the Mongolians defeated, it was just trading in one despotic regime for another.

[yangguo_]

Interesting. I said it was the lightest because the characters, especially ZWJ, didn't live lives that were as stressful or deal with many inner demons as the others. And even though the country had fallen by that time, country didn't play that big of a role as it did in the other two stories.

[Ken Cheng]

I felt that HSDS was the darkest because in it, everything achieved by the heroes in the previous two novels essentially gets undone.

One of the themes of HSDS was to subvert the ideals of heroism and romance established by the earlier two stories.