skygiants

I've spent the past three days trading intermittently off with genarti on her Kobo so we could both finish Tasha Suri's Empire of Sand in time for our book group today. This is Mughal Empire-inspired high fantasy, set in a world in which an omnipresent empire has been overtaking various neighbors by appropriating the magic of the local desert tribe, the Amrithi. Our heroine Mehr is the half-Amrithi illegitimate daughter of an Imperial noblewoman, who ends up unfortunately coming to the attention of the head of the Imperial mystics. Highly fraught arranged marriage, terrible magical coercion, and complex rules-lawyering around binding mystical vows ensue!

The thing I like most about this book is the way it handles domestic sphace: there's a lot of nuance to the way it shows the restrictions on women's roles within the Empire as a double-edged sword, which leave Mehr very few choices but also grant her certain privileges and protections that have value to her at key moments. Mehr spends a lot of time moving very cautiously through the space allowed to her, building relationships with other women, paying attention to the politics of the servant's quarters and exploiting very small openings for as much effect as possible, and it's all very sharply drawn and feels really grounded. The magical element felt significantly less grounded to me and I did in fact have many questions about how some of it worked, but I didn't mind all that much because the human world felt so clear and real and also because I do love magical rules-lawyering. It's also very good about showing how people can try very hard to be kind within a very limited scope of preassumptions and prejudices, and how neither the kindness/affection nor the damage done by their beliefs invalidates the other.

Also, of course, there is the simple tropey appeal of "they're in a forced marriage that neither of them wanted and trying very hard to be respectful to each other about it while also falling in love," flavored with the additional kinkmeme-prompt aspect of "he's constantly fighting a magical geas that compels him to consummate the marriage because if they ever do bang they'll be bound together with terrible consequences."

All of this started me thinking a bit about the appeal of tropes wherein the two parties are forced together by some kind of dramatic circumstance, whether that's arranged marriage or having to complete a perilous journey together or what, and then fall in love as a result -- it's almost the polar opposite of the soulmate-style trope, in a way? The question asked by these stories is not why these particular people are drawn to each other among all the other people in the world, because they're not initially at all. But then you put them in a situation where they're forced to trust and rely on each other to such an extent that it makes perfect sense that they would fall in love -- which sort of presents an implicit thesis that, in fact, if you get to know most anybody well enough, odds are good that you will find they are in fact probably worthy of love. And I think there is actually something really appealing about that! It's nice to think that love is not contingent upon some kind of special quality, that under the right circumstances any human has things about them that are worth loving.

(Of course many stories with this premise try to have their cake and eat it too by having an instant attraction between the two people to show that actually they were drawn to each other from the beginning, but there's no fun in that, the fun is in taking two people who have no reason to pay attention to each other at all and then gradually revealing why they are worthy of love to each other! That's romance!)