skygiants | (no subject)

I just finished Andrea K. Host's Medair duology. I thought the first book, The Silence of Medair, was pretty fantastic! Then the second one kiiiind of went off the rails a little.

Our Heroine Medair is a Herald (as in diplomatic messenger, not as in Valdemar, I was about to say 'no falling in love with horses' but idk, there's some weird stuff going on in the second book) whose life takes a dramatic downturn when a bunch of refugees show up on the shore of her Empire after accidentally destroying their homeland.

MEDAIR: Welcome to our Empire, friends! I have been sent to tell you that the Emperor would like to give you land and supplies and shelter and a helping hand! We are very ready to be accepting of a bunch of gorgeous and stoic white-haired anime characters with angsty backstories! We hope you will have a nice stay!
THE ENEMY KING: Oh wow, that is super nice of him, very honorable, we really appreciate it, but it's going to be really unhealthy for my people's self-esteem and cultural stability to be in a long-term refugee kind of situation, soooooooo now that we're here I think we're just going to conquer your Empire instead?
MEDAIR: >:O >:O >:O

So Medair goes in search of a mythological MacGuffin of great power to save the kingdom from the enemy hordes! Her quest is successful! She's going to come back and save the day! But first, having finished her quest, she takes a nap!

This turns out to be a mistake!

MEDAIR: HELLO I am back with the magical MacGuffin and I am ready to --
THE EMPIRE, NOW ABOUT FIFTY PERCENT POPULATED WITH GORGEOUS AND STOIC WHITE-HAIRED ANIME CHARACTERS: Ah yes, the legend of Medair, who went on a futile quest five hundred years ago, right before our current king's ancestor conquered the nation, took the throne, married the emperor's daughter, and created our current relatively stable society!
MEDAIR: ........welp.

All of this is the backstory. When the book actually begins, Medair is wandering around with a knapsack full of hilariously powerful MacGuffins and literally nothing she wants to do with them.

MEDAIR: I guess I'll just .... take them back .....?

But then she accidentally gets geased into helping an important and powerful white-haired anime character with his quest, so now she's stuck hanging around with a whole bunch of politically important nobles, who may not have very much to do with the conquerors of five hundred years ago but whom it is still hard for her not to have a DEEPLY PERSONAL AND UNHAPPY REACTION TO, who are themselves KIND OF SUSPICIOUS that she's calling herself after a famous historical figure with a symbolic opposition to the current political regime.

(Not to mention the fact that she doesn't know like ninety percent of the important contemporary cultural references and gets INEXPLICABLY FURIOUS when she happens to hear the famous and deeply inaccurate love songs that her douchebag ex-boyfriend wrote about her after she disappeared.)

Most of the first book is concerned with this -- Medair displaced and out of time, keeping all her secrets close to the chest while trying to figure out where her actual responsibilities and loyalties can and should lie now when all her oaths were to people who were dead five hundred years ago -- and it raises genuine and interesting questions about what kind of a role the memory of past injustices should play in making choices in the present, and is really good!

The problem with the second book is partly that it takes a couple of leaps into wild plot territory that I really don't care about as much, but also partly that I don't like the way that it forces a simplification of those questions. Like, as the book goes on, and Medair is sort of forced into a set of binary choices between THE OLD and THE NEW, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore the unfortunate implications of the fact that a bunch of extremely literally white people showed up, conquered the people already living there -- but really nobly! really honorably! -- and now the people in power are almost unilaterally descended from the conquerors, but, I mean, it's basically fine! People aren't suffering! Right? I mean, we could look at some of the systematic injustices that such a situation would set up, buuuuut we're not really gonna.

The story believes that holding onto ancient grudges will in the end lead only to more bloodshed, and yes, OK, I, like Medair, obviously do not think that the faction who want to come in and murder everyone who has any blood of the conquerers in them are correct! But there are more options and complexities in the situation besides "just let go of the past!" and "MURDER ALL WHITE(-HAIRED ANIME) PEOPLE" that are not ... very much touched on. I don't know. There's a point about a third of the way through the second book where I would have been okay with the story ending, and then it continues on well past that and sort of stomps much of its ambiguity into the ground, and ehhhhhh. I would be less annoyed if I hadn't liked the first book so much.

(Also, the romance plot gets really weird in the last few chapters in ways that I don't think I'm OK with??? Host does love her super anime love interests but this is ABOVE AND BEYOND. Through a series of wacky events, Medair's current-time love interest ends up accidentally part-time sharing a body with the ghost of the original conquering king who destroyed Medair's entire country, culture and way of life! But it's OK! Medair admits that, while he was her enemy, she always did kind of think he was hot! THEY'RE GONNA MAKE IT WORK, GUYS, undead threesomes for everyone!

Anyway now I'm rereading Host's And All The Stars, which is only one book and therefore doesn't have time to go off the rails.

Crossposts: http://bookelfe.livejournal.com/410687.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

genarti

This makes me really want to read the first book! Aaaand then maybe stop there.

From:

skygiants

That may be a solid plan! :D I mean, you can see how you feel once you've read it ... I did really like the first one!

From:

genarti

I do like Höst's writing, in general! But I have found it hard to mentally compartmentalize her books in a series from one another -- I sort of regret reading Gratuitous Epilogue, even though I enjoyed many moments of it and it absolutely does what it says on the tin, because I can't remember what's in the main trilogy there and what's in the epilogue of babies and mostly heterosexuality and LOOK EVERYTHING'S FINE THOUGH REALLY, DON'T LOOK TOO HARD AT THE SOCIOCULTURAL IMPLICATIONS I SPENT SO MUCH TIME SETTING UP, IT'S FIIIIINE -- so if the duology starts strong and goes off the rails, I suspect I would enjoy it more if I read the first book and then bugged you to tell me the interesting spoilers from the second.

Maybe I'll read the first book and totally eat my words, though. Who knows!

(Also, and unrelatedly: a while back I picked up A Bad Spell In Yurt via cheap ebook deal, and am currently reading it. So fluffy and adorable and good-natured!)

From:

skygiants

Hah, yeah -- though, I mean, as you know, for me, while I also liked the Touchstone books, I felt (again) like the first book of the Touchstone trilogy was really good and none of the rest of them quite followed through, and you were happier for longer, so maybe that would be true with Medair as well! Oooor maybe not. Honestly, there's pretty much one exact point near the beginning of the second book where I'm like "OK, just STOP. Stop right there. We're good." But she does not stop. :(

(Oh gosh, isn't it cute? POWER OF FRIENDSHIP TO THE MAX.)

From:

oracne

Ditto!!!

From:

skygiants

I will say this for it, the second book is pretty short!

From:

vass

a bunch of gorgeous and stoic white-haired anime characters with angsty backstories!

You are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN this isn't Valdemar?

it becomes increasingly hard to ignore the unfortunate implications of the fact that a bunch of extremely literally white people showed up, conquered the people already living there -- but really nobly! really honorably! -- and now the people in power are almost unilaterally descended from the conquerors, but, I mean, it's basically fine!

*mutters something about how the way Mercedes Lackey set that one up was that the Fantasy Native Americans were given a geas by their Goddess to live in a magical toxic waste dump and vacate it in favour of the white settlers as soon as they'd made it safe to live in*

From:

skygiants

....well. Um. At least her prose is definitely WAY better than Lackey's! Although I realize this is basically an ankle-height bar to clear.

(hahahahahaha yeah I remember that. Yep. IT'S OK THOUGH BECAUSE THEY WERE ALL SO NOBLE AND LIKED BEING NOMADS ANYWAY, yeah? yeeeeeeeeeeee...ah.......?)

From:

kore

(Not to mention the fact that she doesn't know like ninety percent of the important contemporary cultural references and gets INEXPLICABLY FURIOUS when she happens to hear the famous and deeply inaccurate love songs that her douchebag ex-boyfriend wrote about her after she disappeared.)

OK, that's golden.

From:

lnhammer

It is. The title of the first book is from one of those songs.

---L.

From:

skygiants

IT'S HILARIOUS. The douchebag ex spends all this time setting up their epic and star-crossed love in which he pined nobly after her while she did heroic deeds, and she's just like, "wow, can I travel back in time and rip out your spine?"

From:

kore

I am a total sucker for "those bastards, they got it all wrong" heroes-reading-about-themselves stories ever since I had to read Cervantes in college (man is funny! and filthy).

From:

lnhammer

Kiiinda goes of the rails, yes. Not only does the moral questions get simplified EVEN WHILE the political situation goes ~~insanely complicated~~ pear-shaped through the collapsing of alternate timelines, but Medair herself gradually loses agency through the last third of the second book. The last two chapters, she basically does ... nothing to any effect. Which, yes, given the doubling that had been set up, in which she's the ONLY singular person left standing means she has fewer roles than everyone else, but it's still disappointing.

I may reread these one day, anyway.

---L.

From:

skygiants

Yeah, I mean, she's still making internal choices that are personally significant, and the personal is political etc., but the narrative is basically set up in such a way that by the end ALL of her big choices are "will you let go of your justified anger ~~for the sake of this guy~~ or not?" And it's pretty infuriating to watch, because good lord, she should get to hold onto her anger! She can make the ethical choices and still be angry! But the narrative keeps beating it out of her by putting her in these situations where it's SUPER all or nothing.

From:

kate_nepveu

Medair's current-time love interest ends up accidentally part-time sharing a body with the ghost of the original conquering king who destroyed Medair's entire country, culture and way of life! But it's OK! Medair admits that, while he was her enemy, she always did kind of think he was hot!

That's a new variant on this theme!

From:

skygiants

The enemy body-sharing accidental OT3 is much less infuriating in And All The Stars. :(

From:

kate_nepveu

I meant the "he conquered my people and destroyed my country but I love him anyway" thing.

From:

skygiants

OH CRAP I FORGOT YOU HADN'T READ AND ALL THE STARS please forget ... what I just said ...

From:

kate_nepveu

That's okay, I'm not likely to!

From:

lizbee

Oh wow, that is super nice of him, very honorable, we really appreciate it, but it's going to be really unhealthy for my people's self-esteem and cultural stability to be in a long-term refugee kind of situation, soooooooo now that we're here I think we're just going to conquer your Empire instead?

You know, I read that, and I was like, "Host is Australian, which makes that subtext REALLY UNFORTUNATE in light of our current demonisation of refugees," and then I kept on reading, and now I'm like, WOW, HOST, NO.

From:

alias_sqbr

Ohhhhh *suddenly views review in new light*

From:

jinian

It is terrible in multilayered, somewhat contradictory ways! (This is why I tell people not to read Medair. Well, that and the spoiler.)

From:

skygiants

TWO-THIRDS OF THE FIRST BOOK IS REALLY ENJOYABLE. And the subsequent final third of the first book/first third of the second book is not bad! And then the last two-thirds.

From:

jinian

And if you're some kind of miracle person, maybe you can stop partway through things! For me this is not a thing.

From:

skygiants

Nooo, nor for me. But some miracle people are!

From:

skygiants

There is SO MUCH unfortunate subtext -- and, like, I do think the setup could have been handled well and with interesting nuance, and it gets halfway there and then sees something else shiny and goes off merrily chasing it while all the balls it just dropped roll down into the ocean and sadly sink.

From:

thistleingrey

which is only one book and therefore doesn't have time to go off the rails

Oh yes it does. Not as drastically as this sounds, though.

From:

skygiants

But I find the ways in which And All The Stars goes off the rails charming! >.> Rather than DEEPLY FRUSTRATING.

From:

thistleingrey

Hee, yes, important distinction.

From:

starlady

Good to know. I've heard solid things about the first book, so maybe I just won't read this second one!

From:

skygiants

The first book is for the most part very enjoyable! (I mean I was also coming to it right off of a set of bad middle-grade fantasy and extremely dry nonfiction, so I'm sure part of my enjoyment was also just like COMPELLING PLOT! WELL-WRITTEN PROSE! HELLO BOOK FRIEND. No, but I do genuinely think it's good.)