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Jan. 25th, 2010 12:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsWriting about Fuyumi Ono's The Vast Spread of the Seas is going to be a little hard for me because I simultaneously was a little disappointed in it, and loved it passionately. My feelings are sometimes complicated!
To recap: this is the third book in the Twelve Kingdoms series which I am following with extreme interest. The Vast Spread of the Seas is a prequel that follows a pair of characters who, when you meet them in the first book in the series, are firmly established as Awesomely Successful King of En and Advisor. Obviously back in the day things were not so easy! In this universe, kings literally chosen by divine mandate - magical creatures called kirin basically go around looking for them until they experience a revelation and find the right person, and they rule (with the kirin's help) until they screw up enough that they lose the divine mandate, at which point both kirin and king start to sicken. But this process can take a while, and by the time baby kirin Rokuta finds Shoryu, the new king of En, the kingdom has been basically turned into a wasteland by several years of terrible management followed by several more years of no management at all.
Now skip twenty years into the future. The kingdom is slowly getting back on its feet, but Shoryu seems to be your classic Prince Hal-type irresponsible ruler, wandering out of meetings and spending all his time getting drunk and hanging out with the ladiez, much to the chagrin of his advisors. (Who are hilarious, by the way - they are basically all lower-ranked people who got promoted by insulting the king during his first few months of office, and spend most of their time ranting, facepalming, and insulting the king some more.) Meanwhile, Rokuta - who is an eternal thirteen-year-old as well as a magical kirin, and has some backstory issues of his own - is pretty dubious about the whole kingship concept to begin with, and Shoryu's apparent inability to take anything ever seriously doesn't help. So when Rokuta is kidnapped and held hostage by a group of rebels that includes a lonely boy he befriended a long time ago, who say that ALL THEY WANT IS FOR THE KING TO BUILD THEM SOME AQUEDUCTS, SERIOUSLY, he finds himself kind of sympathizing with their cause even as the situation in En starts to build to civil war.
Reasons I loved this book: first of all, I really like Rokuta, the magical chooser of kings who is actually really skeptical about the whole concept of magically chosen kings! (I also love how he is simultaneously a cranky brat, and a holy creature of kindness who literally runs a fever when exposed to too much blood.) He has a lot of conversations that go like this:
PERSON A: Rokuta, the king isn't doing his job!
ROKUTA: Dude, don't ask me, I didn't pick him.
PERSON A: But . . . actually, um, you did. You had a divine revelation and everything.
ROKUTA: Look, take it up with heaven, okay? KINGS SUCK. THE END.
I love all the political discussions and how Ono problematizes her own magical kingship system, and I love the shades of gray and the emphasis on difficult decisions - once again, Ono shows how much she loves stomping on and complicating tropes, and I eat it up with a spoon! And I did love Shoryu, who I don't think it is spoilery to say hides a lot of competence underneath his flippant surface of constant LOL. (I kept picturing him as played by Dam Duk from The Legend.) The dude knows how to work the propaganda machine! It's an important skill in a ruler. I also really loved the constant and deliberate paralleling of Rokuta and Koya, the demon-riding war orphan that Rokuta sees a little too much of himself in, and the way their roles are reversed at the end.
On the other hand, a lot of the stuff I loved with all my heart also had a flip-side that I had my doubts about, or didn't go as far as I wanted it to. Specifically, while I did love how awesome and clever Shoryu was (I cracked up at him signing himself up for the rebel army), I wish he hadn't been so completely set up as being in the right in the end, and that the villain hadn't turned out to be so completely eeeevil - it weakened a lot of the political arguments I really respected the book for making. Also, while I was incredibly impressed how incredibly hardcore Ribi was (only Fuyumi Ono could pull off having a character's Crowning Moment of Awesome involve KILLING AN INNOCENT BABY) I was disappointed that we had two really heroic, principled female characters . . . who both ended up dead. Though I kind of adored the brief glimpse of the mom who signs herself up for the army.
These issues aside, though, I continue to love this series so much. SO MUCH. Sea of Shadows is still my favorite, but this is a really excellent book too, and I am so massively looking forward to the next one. March! Get here faster!
To recap: this is the third book in the Twelve Kingdoms series which I am following with extreme interest. The Vast Spread of the Seas is a prequel that follows a pair of characters who, when you meet them in the first book in the series, are firmly established as Awesomely Successful King of En and Advisor. Obviously back in the day things were not so easy! In this universe, kings literally chosen by divine mandate - magical creatures called kirin basically go around looking for them until they experience a revelation and find the right person, and they rule (with the kirin's help) until they screw up enough that they lose the divine mandate, at which point both kirin and king start to sicken. But this process can take a while, and by the time baby kirin Rokuta finds Shoryu, the new king of En, the kingdom has been basically turned into a wasteland by several years of terrible management followed by several more years of no management at all.
Now skip twenty years into the future. The kingdom is slowly getting back on its feet, but Shoryu seems to be your classic Prince Hal-type irresponsible ruler, wandering out of meetings and spending all his time getting drunk and hanging out with the ladiez, much to the chagrin of his advisors. (Who are hilarious, by the way - they are basically all lower-ranked people who got promoted by insulting the king during his first few months of office, and spend most of their time ranting, facepalming, and insulting the king some more.) Meanwhile, Rokuta - who is an eternal thirteen-year-old as well as a magical kirin, and has some backstory issues of his own - is pretty dubious about the whole kingship concept to begin with, and Shoryu's apparent inability to take anything ever seriously doesn't help. So when Rokuta is kidnapped and held hostage by a group of rebels that includes a lonely boy he befriended a long time ago, who say that ALL THEY WANT IS FOR THE KING TO BUILD THEM SOME AQUEDUCTS, SERIOUSLY, he finds himself kind of sympathizing with their cause even as the situation in En starts to build to civil war.
Reasons I loved this book: first of all, I really like Rokuta, the magical chooser of kings who is actually really skeptical about the whole concept of magically chosen kings! (I also love how he is simultaneously a cranky brat, and a holy creature of kindness who literally runs a fever when exposed to too much blood.) He has a lot of conversations that go like this:
PERSON A: Rokuta, the king isn't doing his job!
ROKUTA: Dude, don't ask me, I didn't pick him.
PERSON A: But . . . actually, um, you did. You had a divine revelation and everything.
ROKUTA: Look, take it up with heaven, okay? KINGS SUCK. THE END.
I love all the political discussions and how Ono problematizes her own magical kingship system, and I love the shades of gray and the emphasis on difficult decisions - once again, Ono shows how much she loves stomping on and complicating tropes, and I eat it up with a spoon! And I did love Shoryu, who I don't think it is spoilery to say hides a lot of competence underneath his flippant surface of constant LOL. (I kept picturing him as played by Dam Duk from The Legend.) The dude knows how to work the propaganda machine! It's an important skill in a ruler. I also really loved the constant and deliberate paralleling of Rokuta and Koya, the demon-riding war orphan that Rokuta sees a little too much of himself in, and the way their roles are reversed at the end.
On the other hand, a lot of the stuff I loved with all my heart also had a flip-side that I had my doubts about, or didn't go as far as I wanted it to. Specifically, while I did love how awesome and clever Shoryu was (I cracked up at him signing himself up for the rebel army), I wish he hadn't been so completely set up as being in the right in the end, and that the villain hadn't turned out to be so completely eeeevil - it weakened a lot of the political arguments I really respected the book for making. Also, while I was incredibly impressed how incredibly hardcore Ribi was (only Fuyumi Ono could pull off having a character's Crowning Moment of Awesome involve KILLING AN INNOCENT BABY) I was disappointed that we had two really heroic, principled female characters . . . who both ended up dead. Though I kind of adored the brief glimpse of the mom who signs herself up for the army.
These issues aside, though, I continue to love this series so much. SO MUCH. Sea of Shadows is still my favorite, but this is a really excellent book too, and I am so massively looking forward to the next one. March! Get here faster!
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no subject
Date: 2010-01-26 01:54 am (UTC)I just wanted to tell you I got your letter! You should be getting one soon!
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Date: 2010-01-26 01:59 am (UTC)(I am looking forward to your thoughts on this one, when you read it!)
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Date: 2010-01-26 02:03 am (UTC)(And I can't wait to get it! Backstory on En! More deconstruction of magically chosen kings! Do want.)
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Date: 2010-01-26 04:58 am (UTC)On one level, I think it was kind of a brilliant turnabout, building the guy up as being the perfect leader, and a rightful challenger to Shoryu's lackluster kingship, and then, bit by bit, undermining all that and reversing the positions (and showing how what appears to be an absolutely reasonable and unignorable political request can be less absolute in the context of the larger needs of the kingdom--I mean, that's the essence of politics and governance, right there; balancing the needs of many people is not simple or pure or easy). Just in terms of the story structure, anyway, it was pretty neat. But in the grander scheme of it, it leaves open the question of what exactly the fuck people are supposed to do if the kings utterly fail their people and the country starts to die. Sit around and hope it all gets better because Heaven said so? Really? (Attention: please follow the signs directing you to the wall you'll be up against when the Revolution comes.)
Maaaaaan I can't wait until you either watch the anime or are caught up in terms of novels to the material covered thus far in my anime watching, because there is at least one major storyline/novel that seems to deal with this question fairly explicitly, and to go where this book didn't.
And oh, I adore Rokuta and his total lack of faith in kings, and his lack of faith in this whole damn heaven-chosen thing. I love the way that even after five hundred years of what appears to be an awfully successful partnership with Shoryuu, Rokuta still seems to be keeping a wary eye on him, and always mindful of his own need to counsel Shoryuu as a king. And Rokuta's wandering spirit--I get the feeling that he travels all over the world and between the worlds not only to spy or to search for missing persons, but also out of some deep-seated unwillingness to just accept this world the way it was presented to him. Like he's always looking for new answers. I heart him so much.
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Date: 2010-01-26 02:46 pm (UTC)(SO GOOD. I am so excited for March and and continuation of current-time storyline now I can't even! (And oh man, if I am having a time restraining myself from babbling now, HOW MUCH HARDER will it be when the new book actually contains YOKO?))
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Date: 2010-01-26 03:00 pm (UTC)I AM SO EXCITED. (My current plan is to start watching the anime after the fourth book comes out in March, because I think that is all it covers anyway. And it will tide me over until the fifth one!)
And yes. <3333 ROKUTA. Yeah, I really love how he is constantly questioning - and in general, I kind of love how none of the kirins (except Taiki, sort of, but also he's a baby) really let their kirin-ness define them. Like, they are super-special divine magical beings, yes, but at the same time, they are people with these very individual identities. And yes, you put it perfectly. He's not just accepting the world and his role in it, he's always challenging. (I am kind of convinced that if Rokuta had been born four hundred years later, he would have tried to bring democratic government to the Twelve Kingdoms. It wouldn't have worked! But he would totally have tried.)
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Date: 2010-01-26 03:43 pm (UTC)(BUT BABBLING ABOUT YOKO IS AWESOME.)