Hey! I hope you are doing well? Have you ever posted your thoughts about The Black jewels by Bishop? Before your started sharing some of your impressions of it, all I had ever seen about it was that it was a proto ACOTAR, that SJM had taken everything good about it and delivered a weaker version. Since you do not seem to share that idea I would be really interested to read more about what you actually thought about it.
Hi! Doing well, thanks! And no, I haven’t posted much! But I will take this opportunity to write an essay about it, because there is truly so much to say.
I had heard pretty similar before reading the books. I went in expecting them to be good, or at least solid? I thought with the game of telephone happening between ACOTAR and every rip off since, that there would be some sort of internal logic or something in the context of the original that was being stripped away over the many instances of imitation. And idk I just did not find that to be the case! SJM’s work particularly is demonstrably influenced by it, but it honestly seems much more internally consistent to me, and like she’s meaningfully engaging with the elements she’s lifted from these books in a way that Bishop does not.
I also think SJM’s work is just better in basically every possible respect, which I do not say lightly because I do not like ACOTAR lmao
In all transparency, I only made it entirely through the first Black Jewels book, and about 75% into the second one. I could not read further! It defeated me! But what I did read of it I found to be poorly paced, incoherent, and miserably boring. There’s also extreme tonal dissonance. I feel like the books are primarily trying to appeal to the particular fantasy of Legend and Labyrinth-esque movies aimed at kids/tweens, where it’s mostly kid stuff happening but then the protagonist also has some charged encounters? There’s this really zany, glittery, middle grade sort of vibe, but then it’s all incongruously backdropped by very sexualized conflicts (there is a lot of rape in these books) that are hardly ever treated with much weight. The dissonance of these two modes really feels like how explicit fanfic of a kids show/movie tends to operate.
I’m actually not convinced that Bishop wasn’t influenced by something else that I’m just not familiar with? Fanfiction-passed-off-as-original-work and regular highly derivative stories are often both governed by a sort of invisible logic that isn’t really legible unless you understand the original thing it is modeled off of. For fanfiction this is obviously the specific source material(s) and for more generic derivative media these are genre conventions and tropes that have been repeated so often that the form is more important than the function, and without access to the trope codifiers, the events of the secondary work are bewildering and abrupt. I got a very strong sense of this while reading Black Jewels! However, it’s also pure speculation and I don’t have a shred of evidence to this effect! It could very well be that Bishop was just so close to her own project that she lost sight of it as something that an audience would have to be introduced to for the first time. Either way, the setting exists in this sort of void that is simultaneously very sparse and lays out zero groundwork to establish a sense of time, place, or texture, while also inundating the reader with numerous trivial feeling details, seemingly at random, as if you should already know what it all means.
Characters are introduced in a pretty similar way. There's this combination of assumed, intense investment and familiarity that is basically identical to how fanfiction operates, because with fanfiction you presumably do care about the characters already.
First Impressions:
The book opens with an in-universe power scaling magic system with thirteen different levels based on jewel color affinity. This basically never comes up in any meaningful way aside from establishing that our protagonists are at thee highest tier of power.
That it’s thirteen specifically seems arbitrary past the unlucky-number edginess appeal and the implication that there is such a massive gulf between the characters who matter and everyone else. This is directly followed by yet another power scaling system that seems to be some sort of literalized, biologically assigned feudal ranking (for example: warlords < princes < warlord princes, and these have nothing to do with actual institutional power or roles) which is ALSO barely relevant except to reinforce the same point. This is just in the opening pages, we haven't even gotten to the story yet.
Onto the prologue, which establishes the lovely worldbuilding mechanic that if women, specifically, are raped in their first sexual encounter, then they will be “broken” ie, lose access to most of their magic and likely go mad. We learn this through the POV of disgraced and broken mad woman, Tersa, who exists to: introduce Daemon, our direct Rhysand predecessor. and also to prophesize the coming of Witch.
Witch is essentially what they call their destined and rightful matriarch leader, who will wear the black jewels and right their world, because currently it's being run by evil scheming women (blanket characterized as arrogant, shrill, horny, and really fucking stupid despite the constant attempts at scheming) who are actually pretty weak magic-wise but have somehow taken advantage of the good will and noble trust of several powerful men to seize power and establish an evil (arrogant, shrill, horny, stupid, etc) matriarchy. We also learn that they have killed all the more magically powerful women and enslaved the powerful men (some of them?) as breeding stock— which they control via magic cock rings. by the way.
Daemon, and his basically irrelevant half brother, Lucivar, are enslaved in such a manner. (Which already may sound kind of familiar if you are familiar with ACOTAR and Rhysand's introduction as essentially an enslaved concubine for the evil faerie queen Amarantha!)
But anyway, Witch's birth is like the desperate hope Daemon has been clinging to for centuries, as he is one thousand and seven hundred years old and has been enslaved for most of that, but no one quite knows when she'll be born, where, etc. It is also taken for granted by the narrative that when she is finally born, and grows up, that she will take Daemon as her consort. Something you think he may have some reservations about considering his experience of enslavement and continued sexual abuse, but no, this series has a very unquestioning might makes right stance. The conflict always comes from unworthy, weaker people stealing institutional power and it having disastrous results, but someone rightfully, innately powerful is always Good and Deserving.
Some years later (I forget, and I am not looking it up) Lucivar practices his only bit of relevance by being the first POV character to meet our Chosen One child protagonist. She teleports to him via a feat of impossible magic, interrupting his cartoonish and blithely rendered miseries. He can immediately tell she is Witch because of how strong she is, and is awed by her goodness/age beyond her years/power/innocence while not really discovering much else about her, because her identity is the main mystery for the first half of the first book.
Characters:
Jaenelle Angelline (not even the worst name in this book) is our protagonist but we just get very little from her. She never gets a POV, and what exists of the plot, that I have personally read, is dedicated to all the thousand(+) year old men in her life being so fascinated by her and how amazing she is, and how much more awesome she will be when she’s an adult and can fuck them. She is even cooler than a regular Witch, because she has an affinity for ALL thirteen jewels, gasp. She is introduced at seven years old, and ages up about twelve by the end of the first book. She’s like… fifteen or so where I left off in the second book, though I've heard it follows her until she's older.
Daemon Sadi (short for SaDiablo?? of all things??) is also ostensibly the male lead— more on this later. This is the most egregious case of a new character being written like the reader should already be deeply invested in and excited to see them. The first thing we learn about this man is just how hot he is and how everyone wants to fuck him, which is a particularly odd choice, considering that Tersa, the first POV narrator, is later revealed to be his mother. And for all the sexual violence and incest in this book, this did not read like an intentionally eyebrow raising moment. I guess it wouldn’t be, because practically every time Daemon is mentioned through the entire first book, all we hear about him is that he’s hot and traumatized and hot and traumatized and so so powerful and so hot and so traumatized. It gets old fast.
Daemon’s estranged father is Saetan, High Lord of Hell, who is fifty thousand years old (but still hot don’t worry) wears a cape, can’t go out in the sun, has long black nails, and drinks blood wine. He's the main other character Jaenelle interacts with, and through whose POV we learn about all the really difficult and complicated magic that the reader has never been introduced to before she is capable of performing on a whim. He positions himself as a father figure for her, but their interactions often have sexual undertones. Saetan was also consort to the previous Witch, and there are a lot of connections drawn between that dynamic and his new one with Jaenelle.
A couple pages after we learn this wife existed at all, it is revealed that she actually just faked her death thousands of years ago and has instead passed onto an immortal state (like Saetan) and is... maybe just acting as some kind of priestess now? I think? This reveal has stunningly little emotional weight. Saetan notably has another bitch ex wife, Heketah, who really wanted him to leverage his power to make her queen of hell, and when he refused she schemed with the main evil matriarch antagonist Dorothea to separate him from his sons and have them enslaved.
Dorothea meanwhile is a vitriolically misogynistic caricature with no real personality beyond it. She holds Daemon as a possible future breeding prospect but is pretty afraid of him. So she keeps sending him to various other courts as “gifts” while he serially murders his captors with total impunity. She’s clearly the basis for SJM’s Amarantha, and manages to make Amarantha look like an icon of feminist literature by comparison. Her only interesting relationship is with her son Kartane, who she is sexually abusing, who in turn starts targeting adolescent girls. Because this is the rape book, set in rape world, he’s founded several “asylums” specifically to facilitate this.
Then we have Surreal, a renowned courtesan and assassin. She seems like pretty direct inspiration for SJM’s Celaena/Aelin in Throne of Glass, though a lot of the specifics are very different. Surreal frankly carried this book on her back. She was the only one ever fucking doing anything! Literally everyone else in the cast is just waffling.
She spends most of the first book investigating her fae (it’s not called that but they’re clearly fae) mother’s death, which eventually pulls her into the main plot. The complication is that she has a history with Daemon. He originally took her under his wing after finding her murdering rapists, because that’s a shared interest I guess. Years later though she got drunk and propositioned him, he found that insulting, and sexually assaulted her, though the book kind of refuses to call it that. They… sort of reconcile anyway.
If there is any remotely plot related thing happening, it's because Surreal is making it happen. Even though otherwise she feels kind of out of place in the story.
Oh, also, there’s Jaenelle's magic sentient horse who refuses to let anyone else ride it but who loves only her. Who then COMMITS SUICIDE when it looks like Jaenelle will be leaving it behind. But don't worry there's a horse afterlife so it becomes like. immortal dead (like Saetan). This is only one of many magic sentient animals who love Jaenelle.
Plot:
Act one is mostly Jaenelle teleporting to Hell to hang out with Saetan, charming all his friends, and taking magic lessons, punctuated by increasingly creepy scenes between them.
Around a quarter of the way through, she disappears for weeks and returns emaciated and traumatized after being sent to one of Kartane’s asylums. Saetan immediately works out what’s happened… and then does nothing. This becomes the book’s defining pattern. Everyone supposedly agrees that protecting Witch is the single most important thing in the world, yet whenever she’s in immediate danger, all these impossibly powerful immortal men mostly just wait around.
Near the halfway point Daemon finally meets Jaenelle. He senses Witch, assumes she’ll be an adult, and instead discovers she’s twelve. This gets really fucking creepy, while Daemon’s POV insists that this is all totally fine and normal and he super promises that he is not sexually attracted to a child.
Eventually Jaenelle is sent back to Briarwood. Once again, the rescue plan amounts to waiting around to get her when she gets back. There is apparently zero urgency whatsoever until unrelated events suddenly force everyone’s hand. Daemon kills Jaenelle’s grandmother, and Dorothea sends her minions after him, and only then does anyone actually resolve to go help her.
Daemon just… breaks the magical enslavement at the end, something that apparently was entirely within his power all along that he just didn’t do for some reason. But then using that much magic drains his supply, so he has to take a nap. I am not joking.
This leaves the rescuing to Surreal, who breaks into the asylum in an extremely abrupt, rushed sequence, sees the ghosts of all the dead girls there, finds Jaenelle, kills Kartane. It’s established the asylum specifically targets poor girls who won’t be missed, but in the same breath we learn that they’ve incidentally have decided to assault and torture Jaenelle, known nobility, to the point of near death, which isn’t even motivated by Dorothea wanting Witch dead. It’s straight up coincidence.
Surreal gets her out, but Jaenelle needs to be taken to Cassandra to be healed, otherwise she may die. They successfully heal her but she falls into a coma because she doesn’t want to come back to life. Daemon goes to the astral plane to convince her to come back, where the book very conveniently turns her into an adult so they can have astral sex guilt-free. (Also in this state she has like… deer legs and a lion tail?)
The second book doubles down on all of this. After a two-year time skip, Daemon has gone kind of crazy, Jaenelle wakes up, Lucivar gets left in torture salt mines over a misunderstanding that could probably be solved by one conversation, Heketah keeps scheming without accomplishing much, everyone continues orbiting Jaenelle, and there are also a lot of talking animals who love her. I quit around three quarters of the way through because I realized nothing was actually happening. From what I’ve heard, book three isn’t much different.
Takeaway:
I cannot overstate how staggeringly, viciously misogynistic this series is. Every woman who isn’t Jaenelle is some sort of caricature.
What frustrates me is that the worldbuilding never commits to its own premise. I can buy a misogynistically written matriarchy. I’ve read Dune and Wheel of Time! But this series simultaneously insists women are politically dominant while constantly framing them as inherently dumb, fragile, petty, irrational, and fundamentally weaker than men who are powerful protectors. You have to pick what kind of gender roles you’re actually writing. Do men serve and are they oppressed, or not?
Instead, the setting often feels like an excuse for Daemon and Lucivar to hate, mutilate, and murder women while remaining completely justified.
The female villains are probably the clearest example. In the first book, a throwaway plotline in the second act is Dorothea and Hekatah approaching Daemon about assassinating Jaenelle (not even knowing she’s Witch, iirc, but just because she’s someone Saetan has taken an interest in) in exchange for his and Lucivar’s freedom. Obviously, it isn’t even an option. These women are evil, but they can’t even be competent about it. They can’t be good at evil scheming. They’re framed as manipulative in the stereotypical “underhanded, wily women” sense, but every scheme is immediately undercut by the narrative. The point of that whole subplot isn’t really to advance the conflict, or introduce any real grappling. It’s to demonstrate how absurd it is to think Daemon would ever betray Jaenelle and, in the process, reinforce how morally superior Daemon and Lucivar are.
The male villains aren’t exactly masterminds either, but I don’t think the narrative ever frames them as inherently ridiculous in the same way. Characters like Kartane are still pathetic and repulsive, but they get at least some suggestion of complexity. The villainous women are almost uniformly one-dimensional: petty, horny, stupid, and easily dispatched if anyone ever bothered to deal with them.
That ties into another issue! The complete absence of meaningful stakes!
I think this comes from the central fantasy the series is trying to maintain. Daemon, Lucivar, and Saetan have to remain stronger than everyone forever, because that’s part of the appeal. But the books also want prolonged suffering and whump. Those desires don’t really coexist. The result is that terrible things keep happening largely because powerful characters simply choose not to act for hundreds of pages. Conflict exists because of arbitrary inaction.
That same lack of engagement carries over into the plotting generally. Bishop seems remarkably uninterested in actually constructing narrative momentum. The books feel more like a collection of vignettes than a linear, progressing narrative. Any real plot that happens is entirely off screen, we mostly just hear about stuff after the fact and see characters reacting to it. There’s never any real urgency, even when there absolutely should be.
Instead, most of the scenes remind me of indulgent “missing scene” one shots, focused on unearned high emotions and dialogue debriefing on some important thing we never got to see play out.
The grooming is probably the most (only?) psychologically real part of the books. But it’s executed in a way that feels incredibly slimy. It also doesn’t really go anywhere or interact interestingly with any other aspect of the story— as much as there is one.
The narrative often goes out of its way to contrive seemingly innocent scenarios for Jaenelle to be having symbolically sexual encounters that intensify as she gets older: Daemon has poison stored under one nail that makes him ill if not released, so naturally she has to “milk it” out of him; or early in the book Jaenelle decides Saetan needs more blood and the book loving describes how she straddles him, and opens her blouse to feed him from her neck. Or Daemon hearing about her as the concept of Witch before he ever meets her and assuming a romantic relationship, while we the reader know that she is seven at the time.
That the book keeps alluding to twelve year olds specifically being raped is also suspect to me! Because it’s kind of, in a horrible way, using that to establish preteens as sexual beings? That they can be perceived that way? But is also doing it through putting these other children through the meat grinder and maintaining Jaenelle’s specialness in contrast, because so much of what everyone values about her is that she’s so ✨innocent✨ and pure. So much so that there’s zero difference in her demeanor and maturity between seven, twelve, or frankly fifteen.
I maintain that the many (many!!) implications of a sexual dynamic between her and Saetan that keeps being waved off with a giggle is super deliberate and that the dissembling is the primary fetish and raison d’être of this story. One example is in the second book when a magic prince of wolves (many talking animals in this series 🙄) asks her if any of the adult men she’s living with are her mate and she’s like “I’m too young for that ☺️✨💖”
While the book goes out of its way to depict Jaenelle getting wildly jealous whenever other women show any interest in Saetan, and contriving two separate scenes for him to hang out in her bedroom (or literally in bed with her!) while she’s naked.
This compounds with the often alluded to in-universe role of older men to be there for younger women to practice at sex and romance with. I feel like Saetan is literally there to be her starter model fatherhusband before Daemon shows up as a serious contender. And the longer the story goes on, the more the narrative seems to lose interest in Daemon.
He’s absent for very large portions of the second book. In the previous one, it seemed like there was any interest at all. But having read further, I do wonder if the constant insistence on his sex appeal and power was in part Bishop trying to talk herself into liking him.
Either way, I really feel like by the second book, he exists more to be an appropriate proxy for Saetan, even if that may not have been the original intent. I get the impression that in constructing Saetan as an untouchable, all powerful patriarch and then Daemon as mentally ill and a rape victim (no matter how hot and powerful he may be beyond that) Bishop ended up taking the shine off Daemon for herself.
I’m hesitant to apply the paradigms of contemporary romantasy to this series, but it falls into it so neatly, and I suppose societal biases are still pretty similar in these regards. The concept of male romantic leads only holding author and narrative interest while presented as powerful, able bodied patriarchs, and having that interest wane when that power is threatened or undermined— even if it’s in an attempt to humanize him or make him more sympathetic— is a really common occurrence.
A friend of mine did read the third book and she said Jaenelle and Daemon are still slow burning in that one too?? Which is fascinating. Also certain developments with Saetan occur (I think. he gets imprisoned, tortured and… castrated? mutilated? the book is unclear) that sounds to me like a deliberate attempt to shake his position as most desirable patriarch in order to make room for and be able to sell Daemon as the real lead.
This is another pretty common thing imo, like you can often tell that an author is unsatisfied with a male lead’s masculinity (and therefore his right to be center of the narrative universe) if it’s threatened by other male characters and requires them to be undercut and symbolically removed from the running as the male lead.
This ties into the pervasive ableism. The way the books frame mental illness and physical disability is really ugly. From rape victims being driven to magical madness, to a minor antagonist being primarily defined by his disfigured, claw shaped hand, the narrative seems to sneer at any sort of disability as weakness— which makes sense with might makes right as its core value. Saetan notably needs a cane to walk, but given how the narrative handles him being tortured and mutilated later, I would not be surprised if that also is an ableist way to try to present him as less desirable than Daemon.
Meanwhile, everything about how this book handles rape is pretty gross to me. It’s so prevalent, and yet it’s also narratively shied away from in this pronounced way. The world building establishes that rape can be specifically destructive for women (the very 90s gender essentialism of this book lol) and irrevocably “break” them. Which is already an attitude I don’t love! But it sets these really high stakes for the very concept of rape (in this case regardless of who is the victim) that I think the author is uncomfortable with? So when it happens to prominent characters there’s always some abstraction or distancing, and the suggestion that it could be worse, that the criteria for real and totally destroying rape have not been met.
For example, we learn early on that Surreal was raped as an adolescent directly after her mother died. We get a description of it, but the focus is all on magic jargon, about “her mind dropping into her web.” The narrative also insists that she’s “magically intact,” and did not break or go mad, despite that being a presumed inevitably for every other woman in the series.
There’s also odd emphasis on Daemon never getting an erection during the frequent number of sex acts he’s forced to participate in, over centuries. The framing starts to read like he hasn’t allowed his perpetrators to fully get to him, therefore he isn’t tarnished and destroyed in the way that an incidental character like Tersa may be.
If your series revolves around rape, eventually you have to look directly at it instead of constantly inventing magical exceptions for the major characters while treating everyone else with visible disgust. It creates a hierarchy of victims that I find deeply unpleasant.
There is similar deflection in Jaenelle’s circumstances. The book keeps you completely alienated from her perspective. We know she’s been violently raped by the end of the first book because that’s the main conflict. But it only really matters for the men in her life to feel bad about how something like this could happen to Witch? It almost isn’t about her at all. And the importance and concern for sexual violence happening to Jaenelle, the most special embodiment of purity and power just isn’t allowed for any other random girl.
Meanwhile when Jaenelle’s rape is narratively confronted, the focus is shifted away from the realities of it or her trauma and how this awful experience may have effected her. That it’s so violent feels like it’s a deliberate push to make it feel less real. The concern instead becomes nebulous life threatening injury. There’s no specificity or grounding to any of it. The two year time skip which she spends in a coma itself feels like another way to just not deal with any emotional fall out for her. She just comes back with nonspecific and unexamined trauma, with the extra fetish material of having gone through physical puberty while still emotionally being twelve.
At the end of the day, Jaenelle just isn’t really allowed to be a person. She exists to be perceived. If she suffers it is always voyeuristically, in a way that emphasizes how saintly and deserving of love and protection she is. She’s an idealized doll. Her interiority does not matter to the story.
ACOTAR:
So Rhysand is literally just Daemon. SJM seems to have ported over his concept wholesale with very few changes. It was a very jarring moment to realize that the Rhysand trademark gesture of hands in pockets that’s everywhere in Romantasy right now was directly lifted from Black Jewels, and that it did have a genuine plot reason!
And Amarantha is just Dorothea, though somehow a less misogynistic portrait of her. Cassian is also basically Lucivar. She even ports over the jewels themselves as the magic “siphons” her Illyrian characters wear. Feyre having the combined power of literally everyone and being the specialest ever is very Jaenelle. So is the way they teleport (winnowing), the sheer number of psychic bonds and telepathic communication running through the cast, the name Prythian. On and on.
But most of the ways SJM lifts from the Black Jewels books feels more like a direct rebuttal. Rhysand’s sexual trauma isn’t handled well, exactly, but it’s still miles more genuinely engaged with than Daemon’s ever is. Amarantha reads like an actual character in a way Dorothea never does. Or it also feels hilariously pointed how much emphasis there is on Feyre being nineteen! Or even how and why Feyre and Rhysand bond at all, and how centered on her perspective the original trilogy is.
I do see this more as influence rather than thoughtless imitation— which is the main marker of derivative works to me. SJM clearly had things to say about the material she was working with. And also she simply does not hate women or rape survivors the way Bishop does and that counts for a lot to me 😭
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