skygiants

I have a vague mission to clean out some of the drawers in my room at my parents' house. I didn't get much time to poke through things this time around, but during a cursory drawer investigation I discovered in my 9th-grade Latin notebook a horrifying treasure trove.

( Doodles, circa 2000 )

As a sidenote, I found this gallery of wonders in a drawer that also contained a.) a very argumentative draft of a co-written melodrama about WWII, circa 2002, and b.) four handwritten pages of a fantasy story about four quarreling siblings who gain magical rings, at a guess written approximately circa 1998, which ends abruptly and is followed by an also handwritten poster reading 'END THE DEATH PENALTY' above a drawing of a bloody axe. I forgot to take a photo of that particular masterpiece.

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.

The thing about Mercedes Lackey's Four and Twenty Blackbirds is that it commits the cardinal sin for a Mercedes Lackey book: it's boring.

Four and Twenty Blackbirds is technically the fourth-fifth-last-whatever in Lackey's magic bards series, but the only thing any bards do in it is get brutally murdered, so I'm not sure if it counts.

Yes, this is a murder mystery! About a MAGICAL SERIAL KILLER! Lackey has clearly read a bunch of pop-psychology books about serial killers and she is very eager to have one-half the Protagonist Team, Tal Rufen the Good Cop, explain all about his serial-killer-related learnings at every opportunity. When a lady is stabbed by a THRUST from a LONG OBJECT, it could be symbolic of something! Who knew, right?

Anyway, Tal Rufen treks to the city of Kingsford and starts working for Lady Judge Priest Ardis -- who is the token Good Priest of the whole series -- to solve the crime! Meanwhile, Mercedes Lackey, in her infinite wisdom, has decided to give us lengthy viewpoint segments from the killer's Evil Accomplice, which means that about 60% of the book reads like this:

THE MURDERERS: Hello, reader! Let me tell you our names and how we commit the crimes!
THE GOOD GUYS: Gosh, I wonder if the murderer could be [murderer] -- no, that's unpossible. Oh, dear, is that two more dead bodies?
THE MURDERERS: la la la murder murder murder la la
THE GOOD GUYS: A clue? No, wait, a dead end. Well, we're still pretty sure it couldn't be [murderer], so at this point we're just plain stumped.

This makes for THRILLING AND SUSPENSEFUL READING, let me tell you. In case you are wondering what exactly our heroes are doing all this time besides scratching their heads and going "gosh, this is a toughie," they're having . . . a romance! Sort of.

And here also is the frustrating thing, because, man, the unspoken romance between an awesome lady priest and her competent and loyal subordinate that can never be acknowledged because of their respective mutual positions and responsibilities and the fact that their life missions are more important to them? Oh, come on, guys, that hits like ten of my narrative kinks! In a good book I would be ALL OVER that.

But this is not a good book, so about ten minutes after they meet, the protagonists each start wondering to themselves if maybe they should throw away everything they've both accomplished in their lives and run away to start up, like, a sexytimes-allowing detective agency or something . . . AND THEN. THE DENOUEMENT.

( Okay technically this is spoilery, if anybody cares )

The other important thing to note is that Ardis has a secretary called Kayne, and every time she appeared I misread her name as Kanye, and those mental images were probably the most entertaining thing about the book.

Well, you guys got the teaser trailer last week -- and everyone who guessed what book that line came from gets a prize! The prize of knowing your inner thirteen-year-old is way stronger than you want it to be -- so I guess today it is time to talk about Mercedes Lackey's The Fire Rose! (Copy courtesy of the fiendish silveraspen.)

At its heart, The Fire Rose is a Beauty and the Beast story. Beauty, or Rose, is a PLUCKY FEMINIST TURN-OF-THE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY GRAD STUDENT fallen on hard times.

ROSE: Oh no! My father is dead and I can no longer afford to finish my dissertation on medieval literature! Clearly the only option is SUICIDE.
A MYSTERIOUS ADVERTISEMENT: Hello! I am a rich, sexy rail baron looking for a tutor for my two fake children. It is very important that my fake children learn ancient Latin, classical Greek, medieval French, German and Latin, and ancient Egyptian and ancient Celtic languages for sinister magic purposes. Bonus points for sexy impoverished ladies with no family who will miss them if they disappear.
ROSE: . . . well, at least I'll be making some money. I can buy an opera ticket and a fancy dress and commit suicide in the middle of the second act, in style!

So Rose jaunts out to San Francisco, where she gets to her new rooms and hears a mysterious voice coming at her through a speaking tube! The voice belongs to THE BEAST, aka JASON CAMERON, a sexy firebending rail baron who has accidentally turned himself into a wolf FROM THE NIPPLES UP and THE KNEES DOWN. The rest of him is totally normal. Well, besides the tail.

( A tale as old as time . . . I guess . . . )

So a few weeks back, jothra had come down to visit and we were hanging out in my living room, and the conversation turned to Mercedes Lackey and other books that we read when we were thirteen, as it so often does.

The relevant dialogue went something like this:

"Remember how she had all those animal people as love interests? Part-animal people? But somehow it was never a problem for sexytimes, because they were only part animal, and -"
"JUST ENOUGH DUDE!"
"YES! JUST ENOUGH DUDE in the place where it counted!"

And then we proceeded to shriek "JUST ENOUGH DUDE!" at each other all the rest of the week, because we are twelve.

The best example of this phenomenon was definitely The Fire Rose, in which the hero gets cursed with a terrible hairy wolfy appearance . . . from the nipples up and the knees down. In between, he's totally normal!

I have sadly lost my copy of The Fire Rose, but, as it happens, I do have my copy of The Eagle and the Nightingale, the one where the hero is basically a man-sized raptor who happens to have a penis. Not only that, but some strange impulse had prompted me to bring it up from me when I came back from Philadelphia the day before Jo actually arrived in New York. Jo also had her copy at home, so the path before us had clearly been prepared.

I am now going to present ( a book review via VERY SERIOUS text message. )

A couple weeks back, genarti, rushin_doll and I went to go see Swan Lake at the Metropolitan Opera.

First of all, it was 100% amazing and I am now totally bitten by the ballet bug - which I can already tell is going to be a tragically expensive passion, but I DON'T CARE. The swan chorus: beautiful! Odette dancing her transformation into a swan: insanely beautiful! Villainous Von Rothbart being a total pimp with all of Siegfried's ladies and Siegfried's mom and then literally SMOKEBOMBING his way out of the scene: insanely HILARIOUS! (And, uh, that is not even factoring in how I was clutching Gen's arm every ten minutes hissing "that's the music from the bit that Kraehe dances to with Mytho! And that's from the bit that Tutu does her solo to, and HEY LOOK that's the exact choreography oh man!" I am not proud of being that ridiculously obsessed, but Princess Tutu remains my One True Fictional Love at this point in time and I can't help it.)

Anyway, after seeing the show, I had an overwhelming urge to reread Mercedes Lackey's retelling, The Black Swan, which I first read during my Lackey-devouring phase as a thirteen-year-old. Basically, the story of The Black Swan is "It's Swan Lake . . . IF ODILE WAS AN AWESOME YA-STYLE HEROINE AND SAVED THE DAY. Also I guess Siegfried has a story of personal redemption somewhere in there too."

To be honest I didn't care much about Siegfried's story of personal redemption or his evil mother or his and Odette's true love, which is kind of shoehorned into the last hundred pages anyways. I wanted the whole book to be about Odile bonding with Odette! And learning about the ~*~power of friendship!~*~ And, you know, enough of it was that I was happy.

It was also super fun reading it right after seeing the show - Lackey spends a lot of time describing set pieces that are taken straight from the traditional ballet's stage settings. The lake itself is the big one ("and there is this GIANT DRAMATIC CLIFF right next to the lake! Funny how that is!") but the party scene with all of the visiting princesses doing their national dances is also pretty notable.

(It did not, however, give me many Princess Tutu associations - the two stories are both working off Swan Lake, obviously, but taking it in completely different directions. Um, unsurprisingly.)