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Aug. 27th, 2018 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skygiantsI got Elizabeth Wein's The Winter Prince out of the library a few weeks ago, because I had acquired all four of its sequels for ebook and I wanted to be able to read them on my travels (which, as it turned out, I didn't, but never mind, this fall contains MANY MORE travels.)
For the record, I DID read The Winter Prince some years ago but even with my distant thoughts helpfully documented it turned out I had forgotten quite ... a lot of it ......
... it's the incest, the thing I forgot was the incest.
I notice that in my old review I explained the Arthuriana plot and described it as "the main sell" for anyone who would want to read it. This is patently not true. The main sell for most people who would probably want to read this book is the intensely tropey Blonde Boy And Dark-Haired Boy Attempt Highly Fraught Emotional Dominance Games, Also They're Half Siblings, Also I Guess They're Both Heirs To The Arthurian Throne But Honestly At This Point Who Cares.
I had a conversation last week withshati about how it's carefully explained several times in canon that Medraut (older, tragic, sinister) is the blonde one and Lleu ("Bright One," younger, refuses to kill things) is the dark-haired one, because Elizabeth Wein Is Trying TO Write Against Tropes, and I've only just now realized that it's not writing against tropes at all; Medraut has to be blonde. The Lymond always is! Julie Beaufort-Stuart in Code Name Verity remains Elizabeth Wein's best Lymond, but she had to get her training wheels in somehow.
I do still love how she handles the poor Orkneys.
For the record, I DID read The Winter Prince some years ago but even with my distant thoughts helpfully documented it turned out I had forgotten quite ... a lot of it ......
... it's the incest, the thing I forgot was the incest.
I notice that in my old review I explained the Arthuriana plot and described it as "the main sell" for anyone who would want to read it. This is patently not true. The main sell for most people who would probably want to read this book is the intensely tropey Blonde Boy And Dark-Haired Boy Attempt Highly Fraught Emotional Dominance Games, Also They're Half Siblings, Also I Guess They're Both Heirs To The Arthurian Throne But Honestly At This Point Who Cares.
I had a conversation last week with
shati about how it's carefully explained several times in canon that Medraut (older, tragic, sinister) is the blonde one and Lleu ("Bright One," younger, refuses to kill things) is the dark-haired one, because Elizabeth Wein Is Trying TO Write Against Tropes, and I've only just now realized that it's not writing against tropes at all; Medraut has to be blonde. The Lymond always is! Julie Beaufort-Stuart in Code Name Verity remains Elizabeth Wein's best Lymond, but she had to get her training wheels in somehow.I do still love how she handles the poor Orkneys.
