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Oct. 25th, 2017 10:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsShirley Rousseau Murphy's Dragonbards trilogy is a perfectly fine 80s YA fantasy chock full of all of the things one would expect, including:
- torturing conquering undead villains, i.e. THE DARK!
- teen royalty in hiding from THE DARK!
- noble talking animals of various stripes that are basically just people in fursuits, most notably a clan of otters who spend most of the first book teaching our amnesiac'd teen royalty hero how to swim ... before he turns around and teaches them all to use knives, bows and arrows to slaughter THE DARK
- a long-lost magical Macguffin
- a missing parent who is presumed dead but secretly off somewhere doing heroic things (a mother, in this case, so that's nice; she gets to appear triumphantly at the end with her soulbonded dragon and save the day)
- relatedly, special people who are destined by birth to have magical soulbonds with DRAGONS!!!!
- relatedly: DRAGONS!!!!!!
In this case, the dragons + soulbonded dragonbards are important because they have the magical power of calling up emotionally intense images of the heroic past to inspire people to throw off the mind-blanking heritage-destroying drug-addicting ways of THE DARK!
...as I was reading, I was started to find myself getting somewhat affronted by this, like -- ok, heroic inspiring memories are nice and all, but for most of us recalling visuals of the past takes effort and funding and a lot of staff time! But it's fine that your fantasy world doesn't need any actual archives to keep cultural memory alive because they have magical dragons to do it instead, I GUESS.
(Fantasyland has no libraries or archives. Fantasyland mentions two books over three novels: Our Hero's sister's plot-relevant diary, and Our Hero's mother's plot-relevant diary, both found left behind at different points in convenient locations. But if all the important royal family members are keeping diaries as a matter of course then WHERE IS THE DANG ARCHIVE? Anyway. ANYWAY.)
Archives erasure aside, the other thing these books got me coming back to -- through no fault of their own other than being perfect examples of the sort of books they are -- is the way so much fantasy tends to revolve around this regressive idea of restoring a lost golden age. If one could simply get the rightful royalty back on the throne, get rid of the invaders and the evil that snuck in with them, get back to the simpler time when we hung out with unicorns and talking animals and everyone lived in peace & prosperity, then all would most certainly be wel! I know quest fantasy has been already been deconstructed six ways to Sunday, but has anyone written the version yet where the hero is sent on the quest for the MacGuffin that will restore the golden age and then the rest of the book is the process of discovering that the golden age had neither class mobility nor indoor plumbing?
- torturing conquering undead villains, i.e. THE DARK!
- teen royalty in hiding from THE DARK!
- noble talking animals of various stripes that are basically just people in fursuits, most notably a clan of otters who spend most of the first book teaching our amnesiac'd teen royalty hero how to swim ... before he turns around and teaches them all to use knives, bows and arrows to slaughter THE DARK
- a long-lost magical Macguffin
- a missing parent who is presumed dead but secretly off somewhere doing heroic things (a mother, in this case, so that's nice; she gets to appear triumphantly at the end with her soulbonded dragon and save the day)
- relatedly, special people who are destined by birth to have magical soulbonds with DRAGONS!!!!
- relatedly: DRAGONS!!!!!!
In this case, the dragons + soulbonded dragonbards are important because they have the magical power of calling up emotionally intense images of the heroic past to inspire people to throw off the mind-blanking heritage-destroying drug-addicting ways of THE DARK!
...as I was reading, I was started to find myself getting somewhat affronted by this, like -- ok, heroic inspiring memories are nice and all, but for most of us recalling visuals of the past takes effort and funding and a lot of staff time! But it's fine that your fantasy world doesn't need any actual archives to keep cultural memory alive because they have magical dragons to do it instead, I GUESS.
(Fantasyland has no libraries or archives. Fantasyland mentions two books over three novels: Our Hero's sister's plot-relevant diary, and Our Hero's mother's plot-relevant diary, both found left behind at different points in convenient locations. But if all the important royal family members are keeping diaries as a matter of course then WHERE IS THE DANG ARCHIVE? Anyway. ANYWAY.)
Archives erasure aside, the other thing these books got me coming back to -- through no fault of their own other than being perfect examples of the sort of books they are -- is the way so much fantasy tends to revolve around this regressive idea of restoring a lost golden age. If one could simply get the rightful royalty back on the throne, get rid of the invaders and the evil that snuck in with them, get back to the simpler time when we hung out with unicorns and talking animals and everyone lived in peace & prosperity, then all would most certainly be wel! I know quest fantasy has been already been deconstructed six ways to Sunday, but has anyone written the version yet where the hero is sent on the quest for the MacGuffin that will restore the golden age and then the rest of the book is the process of discovering that the golden age had neither class mobility nor indoor plumbing?
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Date: 2017-10-26 03:35 am (UTC)I would read this thing!
See also calls for a 'return to Victorian values' (which I managed to type as 'Fictorian values', which is probably closer to the truth)
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Date: 2017-10-26 04:44 am (UTC)That is a very fine Freudian type.
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Date: 2017-10-27 08:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-26 04:23 am (UTC)I remember reading those, because I read anything with dragons in and the bards would have been a bonus, but I can remember so little of them beyond the talking otters and the hydrus (I never figured out why that rather than a hydra) that I have to conclude they were not very memorable dragons. I remember the author much more clearly for a novel called Medallion of the Black Hound (1989), which contained some crack-blended Irish-Welsh myth and otherwise several elements which freaked me out and therefore stayed with me.
[edit] and then the rest of the book is the process of discovering that the golden age had neither class mobility nor indoor plumbing?
It was not quite what you asked for, but I was about to ask if you had read Lloyd Alexander's Westmark trilogy until I thought to check your tags and now I see that you have, so excuse me while I go read that.
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Date: 2017-10-26 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 08:21 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-28 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-27 08:18 pm (UTC)Yeah, Westmark was the one thing I could think of that sort of does this! MICKLE IS FREE.
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Date: 2017-10-27 11:42 pm (UTC)Because there's only one of it, I guess? One hydrus, two hydra...
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Date: 2017-10-26 12:02 pm (UTC)ETA: Oops, editing because upon double-checking with wikipedia it turns out that the prince/love interest, and thus the kitchen sink scene, doesn't show up until Book 2, Searching for Dragons. Which is also a fun read :)
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Date: 2017-10-27 08:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2017-10-28 01:12 am (UTC)But I would definitely read more fantasy novels that involve people going "You know, the past was pretty terrible and maybe something we don't want to emulate today...."