lightreads

I've been thinking about this all morning, and I had a glib answer - he's the token ordinary-ordinary (hu)man, distinguished by order of birth, a longing for the rational and practical, by a desire to protect his siblings (and by extension, mankind), and because he has already begun to pull away and move on at the end of the series; he demonstrates the desire to put everything behind him and strike out into whatever world awaits (his comment that everything needed to wrap up soon or they'd have different school holidays and would be difficult to schedule; his desire to study medicine; etc). He's the human leader, isn't he? Will is at one end of the scale, Bran between (being of neither and both), Simon at the other end. I sometimes wonder whether Simon was supposed to fulfil the role that John Rowlands did in the last book... But none of that is a really satisfying answer, is it?

(I sometimes wonder what led Merriman to try using children in his plans. There are obvious answers, of course - gullibility, malleability, plasticity of thought and belief, and the chance that they would be overlooked - but the timing was only critical by virtue of Will's coming of age and the blossom on the Midsummer Tree (and since time travel was an option, that doesn't seem all that critical really). I mean, maybe Merriman had already tried it with them all as adults and it had failed? Or tried it with other ordinary non-Drew people, and it had failed. Or. Oh god, I need to stop now.)