(no subject)

[skygiants]

I spent the new year rereading that classic work of modern literature, Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen series. I would like to blame this on genarti, whose Valdemar fic I betaed for Yuletide, but in fact I think I ended up rereading more Valdemar than she did, so...uh. ANYWAY.

These books are notable for basically being the platonic ideal of sparkly wish fulfillment, heavily tempered with over-the-top angst. Our Heroine Talia is raised in a sexist, abusive family within a sexist, abusive subculture; then a sparkly magical horse comes to find her and soulbond with her and tell her that not only is she one of the magically special destined heroes known as Heralds, she is in fact the most magically special Herald there is.

But not just that! The plot of the whole first book is pretty much just this conversation repeated over and over again:

TALIA: Wow, I feel so alone and so isolated and so much like a failure and I don't talk to anybody about my real feelings because I'm so afraid of rejection. D:
OTHER CHARACTER: Talia, you know, it's so weird, but you're so kind and understanding and patient and empathic and wise beyond your years, I just feel like we're SOUL-FRIENDS, like HEART-SIBLINGS, like you understand me better than EVERYONE ELSE I KNOW. I realize we met last month. AND YET.
TALIA: ...I'm not one hundred percent sure how this happened, given that I spend pretty much all my time not opening up to people, but cool, sure!

In her free time Talia is almost murdered and is rescued by all the people who now love her, and embarks on some politically significant babysitting. And I will say, now that I am older, I appreciate a lot more how all of Talia's very domestic skills -- babysitting! sewing! doing chores! earnestly listening to people's problems! -- are given the same heroic narrative weight as dramatic battle scenes and so on.

...that said, who can forget the heroic and emotional climax of Arrows of the Queen?

KEREN, TALIA'S LESBIAN BEST FRIEND: The love of my life has been killed and now I'm emotionally unstable and suicidally depressed!
THE HERALDS: Talia! What do we do?
TALIA: With my magic emotional powers, I sense that ... we must ... QUICK, THROW ANOTHER LESBIAN AT HER!

So Talia finds the only other lesbian in the books and basically chucks her at Keren and saves the day, thus proving that any problem can be solved if you throw enough lesbians at it.

(But, I mean, that is always sort of how trauma works in the books -- it lasts for exactly long enough to milk the maximum level of angst out of it, but as soon as it's no longer narratively convenient, it's GONE LIKE THE WIND. See also: Talia's magically disappearing PTSD at the end of the third book.)

Then comes the second book, which is basically the story of Talia's extended magical depressive spiral on tour around Valdemar with her mentor, Super Sexy Kris. At the end of the book Talia has a SOUL-FRIENDS-with-benefits relationship with Super Sexy Kris and better self-esteem, which is good, because hoo boy, if you thought Arrow's Flight was an angst vortex, wait until Arrow's Fall!

Arrow's Fall is half about Talia's relationship drama with Kris' best friend, Less Sexy Outside But More Than Angsty Enough To Be Sexy Anyways Dirk. Talia and Dirk have spoken about three times total, but they can't stop thinking about each other and everybody knows they'll be in magical lifebonded love if they ever actually manage to have another conversation.

ALAS, then this happens:

KRIS: Dirk and Talia, sitting in a tree! K-I-S-S-I-N-G!
DIRK: So hey buddy, did you and Talia ever ...
KRIS: Sure we did! We're good friends, it was no big! But anyway, about the fact that you and Talia should TOTALLY get married --
DIRK: omg Talia loves Kris omg Kris loves Talia omg Kris is so much hotter than me too omg how can I stand in his way I want him to be happy but I also want Talia to love me I'M BEING TORN APAAAAAAAART

And so Dirk spends most of the first half of the book angsting, pining, boozing, and running away from Talia or Kris when they try talk to him like a normal human being. Neither Kris, who is Dirk's best friend and knows his issues better than anybody else, nor MAGICALLY EMPATHIC TALIA can figure out why this should be so, because if they did it would end the big misunderstanding and where would the plot be?

And then the second half of the book happens and Talia is being held captive in a really gratuitous torture dungeon, which, on the one hand, is annoying because I always feel like you should avoid having your protagonists gruesomely broken in gratuitous torture dungeons whenever possible, and on the other hand is annoying because the villains' evil plans as monologued to Talia make literally zero sense, but on the third hand, it's annoying because the sudden arrival of an EVEN BIGGER BOATLOAD OF ANGST works to resolve things without ANYBODY EVER SPEAKING TO EACH OTHER LIKE AN ADULT.

. . . oh, how I ate these books up. And let's be real: my inner twelve-year-old still does. HELL YEAH, Dirk and Talia have the sparkliest wedding!

The worst bit comes at the end, though, though, when all of a sudden you are ambushed by a twenty-page compilation of Mercedes Lackey's filk about everybody's feelings, which, amazingly, manages to be even more over-the-top than the novels themselves. Even as an eleven-year-old, I did pick up one important lesson from Mercedes Lackey: DON'T INCLUDE YOUR OWN POETRY OR FILK IN YOUR NOVEL. It will never work out well in the long run.

Comments

[bookblather]

These are honest-to-god some of my favorite books ever, and I'm not 100% sure why because they are SO BAD, and yet I ADORE THEM. Probably the nostalgia factor? I mean, it was legit the first time I ever saw any person of any kind of gay persuasion in a novel, although to be fair to Tamora Pierce it only edged out one of her books by virtue of which one was on the library shelves at the time.

[skygiants]

The nostalgia factor IS STRONG with these ones. I shouldn't have done the reread, to be honest; now I'm fighting down the urge to go further down this nostalgia-lined pathway, and I have so many actually good books I should be reading!

[cahn]

I... must admit that as an eleven-year old I liked the filk too. I AM PROPERLY ASHAMED OF MY ELEVEN-YEAR-OLD SELF. In fact... oh, this is so embarrassing... somewhere, probably in my parents' house, there is actually a tape I bought of Lackey performing the filk. I must say that even my eleven-year-old self realized that was over the top.

[skygiants]

. . . oh, man. You realize you now have a responsibility to dig that up and review it for us, right?

[ailis_fictive]

I own *all* the recordings. That order to Firebird was one of the largest purchases I'd ever made (at 14).

I love them pretty much unabashedly.

[thistleingrey]

There are a very few exceptions re: poetry; Poul Anderson did fairly well at the alliterative faux Old Norse/English stuff, frex, and for Rose under Fire the poetry is . . . appropriate to the level at which the character could be expected to write. Agreed in general!

I found Lackey somewhat more interesting at short-story length--first encounter was the Sword and Sorceress anthologies edited by Bradley--but she did have a weird knack for latching onto reader id and handwaving much of the logic out of sight. (Using the past tense because the latest copyright date on anything of hers I've read is 1991. I did read everything up through then, but that was enough.)

[skygiants]

I'm actually pretty conflicted on the Rose Under Fire poetry, because, like, yes, it is appropriate to the level and the way in which it changes over the course of the book does some quite important things ... and yet, my instinctive cringing whenever an author puts her own poetry into a character's mouth!

(I've calculated my Lackey expiration date before and, if I remember correctly, it's 1995. Everything published before 1995 I read with a wave of pleasant nostalgia, and if I try and read anything published after, I VERY SOON REGRET IT.)

[jinian]

My response is 100% LOL and no content.

[skygiants]

That's pretty much my response to these books!

[inkstone]

AH NOSTALGIA.

And I remember the filk that she included at the end of all the different trilogies, LOL.

[skygiants]

And it was always such INCREDIBLY ANGSTY filk! My favorite this time around was the one where Kris sings about how before meeting Talia he didn't know how to love anyone, which is NOT EVEN IN ANY WAY TRUE.

[varadia]

The filk always made me imagine the book as a musical.

Can you imagine Companions as shown onstage? Either it would occasionally be a real horse and there would be crap-shoveling, or it would be a really awkward dude in a horse mask pretending to be ridden.

And whoever played Rolan would never get to say anything, unless it was loud wordless emotional singing.

*solemn*

Poetry.

[telophase]

If they did it in the way that The Lion King stage show portrayed animals, it could work. You'd have to have the Heralds run around behind their Companions, though, to signify riding.

[skygiants]

I WOULD PAY SO MUCH MONEY FOR THAT MUSICAL, LYNNE. omg. What would be best actually is if they went the Milky White route from the original Into the Woods, and all the Companions were plastic props they had to carry around by a handle. Plastic props with tape players inside! So that when Rolan FINALLY talks to Dirk at the end he can bust out a REALLY SPECTACULAR BARITONE. I can't see Rolan having anything but, like, James Earl Jones levels of baritone.

[intothespin]

These books are notable for basically being the platonic ideal of sparkly wish fulfillment, heavily tempered with over-the-top angst. Our Heroine Talia is raised in a sexist, abusive family within a sexist, abusive subculture; then a sparkly magical horse comes to find her and soulbond with her and tell her that not only is she one of the magically special destined heroes known as Heralds, she is in fact the most magically special Herald there is.

It is like a direct line to the pre-teen/teenage id.

[kate_nepveu]

There is a reason I put her as one of the examples in my Mary Sue talk!

[skygiants]

PURE AND UNDILUTED. Who didn't want a magical sparkly horse to come tell you that you were a better person than everybody else!

[ambyr]

This unspoiled chapter-by-chapter reaction thread to the books by an adult reader is one of my favorite things on the Internet.

[skygiants]

Hahahaha wow thank you for linking this, I am going to have SO MUCH FUN.

[vass]

TALIA: With my magic emotional powers, I sense that ... we must ... QUICK, THROW ANOTHER LESBIAN AT HER!

With an extremely convenient hitherto unrecognised lifebond. To both Keren AND Ylsa. Because when you're grieving the loss of the love of your life, there is NOTHING more reassuring than "I've been secretly pining after both you and your soulmate, and that's why I've been hanging around both of you with my tongue hanging out all this time. I was never going to say anything before, but now Ylsa's dead I had to seize the moment."

And Keren's response: "We'd actually been wondering about that. We were attracted to you too, but we were waiting for you to make the first move." Dear Mercedes Lackey: this is NOT a moral you should be teaching teenage lesbians in love with their local middle-aged sexy equestrian teachers and bicycle couriers who are already involved with each other. Mortification will inevitably ensue.

because if they did it would end the big misunderstanding and where would the plot be?

Not to mention the extremely romantic collapse from pneumonia, forever after (or at least for the next few years) the standard of romantic love.

For me the most WTF part on rereading AOTQ, though, was the bit with Talia's classmate whose Gift is Projection, and he traps her in his memory of being prostituted as a child. Talia asks how such terrible things can happen, and he reassures her that it was in another country, and their teacher (I can't remember who) promises them both that one fine day, the Heralds will be welcomed in every country in the world, and they'll put a stop to it.

And I'm like WAIT, did you just say the ultimate goal of the Heralds of Valdemar is to establish universal, planet-wide Heraldic justice/law enforcement? Do the non-Heralds know that?

[skygiants]

Oh my god, right? I had actually forgotten how incredibly convenient lifebonds were, and how little they relied on actually interacting with the other person. Or any consistent logic whatsoever.

I love how everybody else's reaction to the huge misunderstanding tangle of over-the-top emotions is "omg, what a story, you guys are going to be the next great Romance of the Century!" When in fact what the romance consists of is Dirk being drunk and then falling over of stupidity-induced pneumonia, and Talia spending three months being clueless and stressed out.

And HAHAHAHA YEP. Do you remember a couple years back, when someone asked for an evil Valdemar AU where the Companions were sinister for Yuletide, and everyone and their mother jumped on the prompt? It's actually really impressive now ... not at all difficult it is to make that step ...

[sovay]

I spent the new year rereading that classic work of modern literature, Mercedes Lackey's Arrows of the Queen series.

I file Arrows of the Queen under one of my weirdest disappointments in a series because I loved the conceit of magic as a lost technology, a dangerous, semi-controllable force that either killed its last practitioners (hello, Lavan Firestorm) or was abandoned as fewer and fewer people knew how to use it safely or was simply lost in the wars and all that's left nowadays is the smaller Gifts—"Herald's magic"—and the one spell everyone with a Gift can learn, which no one's been able to reverse-engineer anything from. When we finally see real magic in Arrow's Fall, it's weird and horrifying and involves things like demons on the battlefield and setting them on fire. And I know there's the entire Mage Winds/Mage Storms trilogy about magic coming back into the world, but (a) they never really addressed this idea of magic as perilous and alien and as likely to explode your head as build you a road (b) they kind of sucked. I'm not sure I've seen anyone else take it up, either. But I am seriously behind on my awareness of the field for some years now, so I could be wrong.

[edit] I love Alberich. I encountered him before any of the rest of the world, because of "Stolen Silver" in Horse Fantastic (1991), so I was delighted to recognize him as a walk-on in Arrows of the Queen and pretty much anywhere else he turned up after that, until I maxed out on Valdemar with The Silver Gryphon (1996) and consequently never read either of the novels about him, which is probably all right. I apologize for nothing where original-series Alberich is concerned.

In adding this note, I just realized I don't know if I still have my copies of Arrows of the Queen. I might have thrown them out in some post-college shelf-purge. I can't decide how I would feel about that.

[skygiants]

Hah, it's kind of the opposite for me. I actually have a powerful lingering affection for Mage Storms -- pretty much alone of everybody else I know! -- because of how half the protagonists were ordinary, un-magical sort of people determined to wrench some kind of logic out of this weird magic system BY HOOK OR BY CROOK. Half of me wants to reread and see if my fond impression holds up, and the other half of me is aware it would be a terrible idea!

From what I remember of it, Justine Larbalestier's Magic Or Madness series seems to pick up a little of that idea of magic as a terrible force that inevitably destroys its practitioners, but it didn't have the lost technology aspect, and also I disliked the first book so I never read the rest. That's the only thing presently coming to mind, though.

Also Alberich is CLEARLY THE GREATEST. genarti keeps trying to convince me I should give the Alberich books a try, and I keep feeling like this is also ... probably a terrible idea.

(I couldn't find my copies either! I read my roommate's Kindle copies instead. It wasn't the same. It was especially frustrating because, while I couldn't find the Arrows books, I could easily locate ... Owlflight. OWLFLIGHT? REALLY? Come on, household gods!)

[kate_nepveu]

Heh, _Silver Gryphon_ is where I started running out of steam, though I didn't actually stop until the dreadful, dreadful Owl books that came after.

(Despite that I've since read all of them except some of the current prequels, and yeah, you aren't missing much by skipping Alberich's books.)

[carmarthen]

I am ashamed to admit I still kind of like Lackey's filk.

[skygiants]

No shame! None of us have ANY ROOM to have any shame about anything Lackey-related or we would have no time to feel anything else. And I do kind of like "Threes."