skygiants

Let me start out by saying that I had a great time reading Sarah Rees Brennan's Long Live Evil. I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a wonderful distraction in a difficult week. I will read the sequel.

I am now going to attempt to describe the experience and I want it to be understood that I mean this in the most value-neutral, non-pejerative way possible: I read a lot of recent books that have a definite eau d'AO3 about them, and it was honestly quite refreshing and nostalgic to pick up a book that instead feels like reading a longfic on LJ circa 2005.

I do not mean the plot ... well, I sort of mean the plot. In 2005 we did not yet have the thriving genre of Villainess Isekai -- that didn't really kick off until mid-20-teens -- and Long Live Evil is emphatically a villainess isekai. However, 2005 was the immediate post-Buffy era, and what we did have in spades is Quippy High School Girl Enters High Drama Fantastical Situation, dropping memes and one-liners like there's no tomorrow, to the befuddled admiration of everyone around her. Another genre is possible! We don't have to take ourselves so seriously! At least not until it's time for a big angsty scene -- and it will eventually be time for a big angsty scene, have no fear, we can have our cake and eat it too. But first, there will be a musical episode.

Long Live Evil is what happens when you take the villainess isekai plot and absolutely marinate it in this particular 2005-era sensibility. Our Heroine is dying of cancer when she gets transmigrated into a minor villainess in her favorite epic fantasy series; unfortunately because she read the books while she was dying of cancer, she has forgotten much of the plot of the first book, which does not prevent her from saving herself from imminent execution by claiming to be a prophetess with visions of the future. She then spends the next several hundred pages sailing around and encouraging the other minor villains in her orbit to be fun and campy. There are over-the-top outfits! There is a musical episode! Everybody gets to romance their favorite character, and ALL these romances have a healthy dose of angst and betrayal and situations where one of the characters has to menace the other with a sharp knife! ( spoilers but also as soon as you meet any of these characters it is not a surprise how things will play out )

There are also possibly more memes by volume than in the Locked Tomb series and I do not say that lightly. The one that really broke me is when one of the in-book characters is looking at his love interest and thinks the mouth worried you until you knew him and then it worried you more. This is not even a meme unless you are on a very particular subset of tumblr. It is a quote from Ernest Hemingway's The Moveable Feast regarding F. Scott Fitzgerald. But I know in my heart that it's in this book because it circulates on tumblr, and I also know in my heart that maybe 5% of the book's actual readership would recognize it as either a meme or a quote, and there isn't even the excuse that the character in question might be actively quoting tumblr because he is not a transmigrator, so what, pray tell, is it doing here?? And I have no answer, except that this is the kind of thing that people did in 2005, on livejournal, which is to collect little in-jokes and throw them magpie-like into their fanfics as Easter eggs or something.

But, also, setting all this aside, Long Live Evil is genuinely doing everything that I want out of the genre of isekai! I get bored with portal fantasy where the characters' backgrounds do not matter to the action; our heroine's personal history is central to the plot in every direction. I enjoy when we get a little meta about isekai ethics and how we feel about fiction vs reality; so does Long Live Evil! The tension between two central transmigrators about whether the experience that they're experiencing should be judged according to the ethics of reality or the ethics of fiction is my favorite element of the book. I like when background characters matter and are significant and have the ability to throw the plot in new and unexpected directions, and so does Long Live Evil! And I also like the experience of coming across a completely absurd but inexplicably compelling fic at midnight and staying up too late to read it, and this Long Live Evil absolutely provides.

I do not like tripping over a tumblr meme every five pages and going 'again?! we are in the POV of an in-universe character now! this man has never been on tumblr and never will be!' It does break my peaceful 'it's fine, this is spiritually from 2005' suspension of judgment, because even though did not have tumblr in 2005. But you can't win them all.

I sort of don't have all that much to say about Team Human, not because I didn't like it -- I did! -- but because it basically does what it says on the label, or at least on the subtext to the label.

For those unfamiliar, the label says: friends don't let friends date vampires!

The subtext to the label (which is a lot more wordy in translation) says: this is a response to Twilight and other recent vampire-ish teen romance, and we would like to talk about the importance of friendship, and teenaged girls making their own decisions about their own lives, and also, yes, the fact that the vampires-in-love-with-high-schoolers trope is kind of ridiculous, bless their little gothic hearts.


As someone who has often read novels with romances in that made me think "NO NO HONEY LET ME RUN AN INTERVENTION FOR YOU," I approve of all this! I enjoyed the book, I enjoyed the way it poked fun at the tropes without being mean about it. I don't have a ton more to say about it; you know, it came, and it did its thing, and I nodded along, and then it left, and that was pretty much that.


(Although I do feel the need to point out that Merc did it first, all the way back in -- gosh, was it really 2009? -- in her unfinished masterpiece Vamptervention. Although hers went in a very different direction. TAKE IT LIKE A MANPIRE!)

I am kind of just laughing about the Amazon reviews of The Demon's Surrender that complaining about not getting a Ryves brother POV, because man, I was ALL ABOUT Sin's POV in the final book. Sin is awesome! Also I think it's cool that Sin has very justifiably different concerns from all of the previous narrators, and trusts completely different people, so whatever, Amazon reviewers.

It's always hard to write about the third book in a trilogy without spoilers (especially when you read it almost two months ago, I AM SO BEHIND on booklogging), so just to recap: the series takes place in a world where evil magicians control demons who can possess people, and follows a pair of brothers with a DARK SECRET that is spoilery for the first book, a brother-sister pair with a few other secrets and goals that are spoilery for the second book, and an ambitious dancer at the magical market, who is Sin and the POV character for the third book and continues to do many things that are spoilery. They are excellent on dark worldbuilding, interesting character motivation, and family-centric storytelling, and although I am not a fan of all the narrative/plot choices they overall make for extremely enjoyable reads.

( And now I can go into the personal-reaction spoilers! )

When I picked up Sarah Rees Brennan's The Demon's Lexicon, I knew from interviews that one of the author's goals in writing it was to really get into the head of the Tall, Dark, and Moderately Sociopathic (But Sexy) protagonist who pops up in so much fiction and present an unglamorized version. And she did a very good job with that! It is not the book's fault that I did not love being stuck in the head of a Tall Dark and Mildly Sociopathic Protagonist much of the time, which was the main reason that this book is not making it up into the ranks of my favorites.

What I did very much like about the book:

1. The mythology, which is cool and dark and deals with the consequences/sacrifices of magic and a magical economy in a nicely gritty way. (The basic idea is that to gain power, magicians have to offer a chance for demons to spend time in this world, which generally involves sacrificing humans to be possessed; their opposite number, the members of the Goblin Market, make money selling charms and defenses against demons and magicians.)

2. Many of the characters! Even Nick, who is the protagonist, I found interesting - he is the kind of character who has difficulties with empathy and understanding other people (to put it mildly) and is pretty much entirely focused on his brother Alan, whom he wants to protect even though he doesn't understand him either. It was a cool and unusual viewpoint (and I really did like how she set up for the ending), but the problem for me is that I was just as much or more interested in all the other characters that Nick emphatically Doesn't Care About - and also in Alan whom we only see through Nick's eyes - and so after a few chapters of Nick I wanted to go follow someone else around for a change. Does this happen to anyone else with books, where you enjoy the story but you would like be in someone else's head to see it happen? (This happened to me in Harry Potter, too.)

3. The fact that our protagonists are not on any kind of crusade to save the world, but are in it for their own personal survival and to protect the ones closest to them - the story kicks off when the brother of the girl that Alan has a crush on gets marked by a demon for possession, and eventually Alan also gets marked, and as far as Nick knows the goal is the simple one of Getting The Mark Off Alan, and I Guess Off Jamie Because Alan Won't Shut Up About It Otherwise.

4. The complicated and morally gray backstory going on with the previous generation. I was pretty fascinated by Alan and Nick's morally ambiguous/completely insane mother Olivia - and, again, I really wanted to see many scenes that Nick just did not care about, such as the conversations between Olivia and Alan's crush Mae. (Actually I wanted to see more of Mae in general, who is the main female character, but who, again, I could not get much of a fix on, because Nick does not care about anything about her except that she is occasionally annoying and has boobs.)

However! This is the first book in a trilogy, and from what I understand the other books will be from the viewpoints of different characters, and I am pretty excited for that! The author has posted short stories set in the same universe on her LJ as backstory for some characters who appear in the book, and those actually got me way more excited for the sequels than the book itself did - I would especially highly recommend The Arundel Tomb, which can stand alone as a short story, is not really spoilery for The Demon's Lexicon, and has magic and female friendship and love triangles that aren't!