#finx does fandom

[aethersea]

it's funny how often, in the queen's thief books, the sad and shocking twist is that the love was there all along. there's the big obvious one, of course, but it comes up again and again: Dite with his hopeless crush, Sejanus with his mocking cruelties, Relius with his abject devotion and Teleus with his stalwart loyalty, Attolia's ladies closing ranks around her, Sophos telling all his tale and bashfully leaving out how often and how wistfully he thought of Eddis. in other cases it grows silently and catches our narrator by surprise: Costis down the well, Pol on the cliffside.

and it doesn't save everyone. love is not always a gentle thing, and it's not always enough. the minister of war nearly strangled his son to death. Sejanus committed treason. Eddis went to war. but it's always there, unobtrusive as a shadow, pervasive as the sunlight.

I think sometimes of a quote from mwt saying she front-loads the trauma: the worst thing that is going to happen to the characters, emotionally, generally happens in the first few chapters. their world ends, their life shatters, they lose everything, they are alone and afraid with no allies and no hope. and then we rebuild. over the course of slow, painstaking pages, they regain their footing in the world, carve out a new self, discover a new perspective and a new strength. further ills befall, of course, and at the great climax everything seems bleak and dire once again, but it's still not the worst thing to happen to them. they face the dire moment bravely, afraid but not alone, certain now in who they are and how they will face the end if it comes.

I'm still mulling this over, I don't have a tidy knot to tie between these points, but they feel connected. something about the compassion woven through these stories, both for the characters and for the readers. something about how they're tales of intrigue and adventure, yes, but they're also stories about building something good, and about seeing the best in people even when their worst is horrific, and about love as an act of courage in a harsh world. love as an act of faith. love as the last thing left that might be able to save you.

[aethersea]

A neat thing about The Goblin Emperor is that while it's a classic trope of the lost heir plunged into a morass of courtly intrigue where he has no idea whom he can trust, the very first thing it does is emphasize how much he has to choose to trust anyway. Maia has to trust the head of his household to appoint his body servants, and he has to trust those servants. He has to trust the adremaza to appoint his nohecharei, and he has to trust his nohecharei. Any one of these people could kill him. Any one of them could carry gossip to his enemies, or make him look bad in public and thus weaken him in the eyes of the court. But if he so much as implies a discomfort with these choices, he'll offend powerful people without cause – and anyway, how could he possibly pick better? He has no idea what he's doing. He's forced to rely on people. He's forced to trust. The only person he actually personally chooses is Csevet, and what he chooses to do is essentially hand Csevet the keys to the empire. He got so fucking lucky there, that could have gone so incredibly badly.

But it didn't. Because, as the book emphasizes, trust is the right choice. Even when it does go badly, even when he is betrayed, that doesn't mean the trust was wrong. Because when one person betrays him, every single other person around him shows how truly loyal they are, not only by rushing to his aid, but by caring so deeply and obviously about him.

That's why this book feels so odd for its genre: there's a bunch of complex courtly intrigue going on, but Maia never plays the game. He never schemes, he's never playing 5D chess with his enemies. He has to navigate the factions of the court and try to win them to his side, but he does so by being kind and forthright. He's completely blindsided by the coup attempts, and frankly so are we, because he's just been focusing on other stuff! And he survives them, not through his own cunning, but through the love of those he placed his trust in.

[aethersea]

fun little linguistic detail in the goblin emperor I don't know what to do with: the Great Avar's family symbol, the sea serpent that becomes part of first Chenelo's and then Maia's personal sigil, is called the Corat' Arhos, the Cruelty of Water. the Avar's home, implied to be his palace and thus the Barizheise equivalent of the Untheleneise Court, is called the Corat' Dav Arhos.

we know dav is the household, presumably meaning both all the people that comprise it and the place itself, much like 'house' in English. so he lives in the...Cruel House of Water? Water House of Cruelty? interesting name for a capital.

[aethersea]

The thing about the Joker is that he sees himself as The Only One Who Understands That Nothing Matters. Life’s a joke and all that's real is the punchline, and he’s always the one with the last laugh. And this lends itself really well to a fourth-wall-breaking character who winks at the audience like Bugs Bunny, because he KNOWS nothing is real and no consequences can truly touch him!

But, and this is the Key Thing about the Joker, that never happens. He never winks at the audience. He’s never actually in on the joke. And that’s because he’s not funny lying to himself. Things matter to him all the time actually! Everything matters SO MUCH, because the Joker thinks he’s the center of the whole entire universe and when people aren’t paying attention to him, he doesn’t laugh about it, he throws a massive temper tantrum.

And it’s not that he wants the spotlight, exactly. It’s that he wants to be vindicated. He wants to prove that his worldview is the correct one. He wants to prove that he’s right, and always was and always will be. Because he really does believe that he’s infallible.

But you can’t tell a good joke if you don’t know how to laugh at yourself.

[aethersea]

absolutely losing it trying to figure out the economic situation in Camelot in BBC Merlin. Arthur says that “the people” make just enough to subsist, and the taxes are already as high as they can bear to afford (s2e6 “Beauty and the Beast pt 2”). he says he knows this because he’s the one who goes out among them, unlike his dad who just sits at home all the time. but do we ever see Arthur interact with someone outside the city proper? we do not. are the people in this city really living hand to mouth? they sure don’t look like it – there are taverns, businesses, we never see a single homeless person, and the one Ordinary City-Dweller whose house we do see (Gwen) lives alone, with no apparent financial difficulty, on just one person’s salary. this is never framed as unusual. 

but then again, Arthur did sound like he was talking about farmers producing just enough crop to feed themselves. so maybe this new tax is just punitive for people in the countryside, not in the city, and Arthur hangs out there between episodes. 

but then two scenes later we see tax collectors taking All An Old Man Has in the heart of the city itself. okay, I guess this means the city is not an economic center? for a slight tax increase to have such a devastating impact? 

but if everyone’s so desperately poor, how do they pay for so many guards? they literally just stand around in various palace corridors and city streets, every day, wearing their expensive chain mail and holding their expensive weapons. clearly Uther is taxing the populace blind to maintain his standing army. but honestly where are all these guards even coming from? Camelot is not that large! they never mention ANY population centers other than the city proper and “the outlying villages,” where they’re always sending riders whenever there’s some emergency. other than that it’s all cursed forests and meadowed hills for Arthur and Merlin to ride through dramatically. 

and on TOP of the regular guards, Arthur has a good 15-20 knights who work directly under him as an elite force – way more than that if you count all the ones who die and have to be replaced every few episodes – and every last one of them is a youngish man of noble birth. where are their families? do they have no sisters? cousins? baby brothers? parents?? Uther’s said to have “established” the knights as a way to solidify his rule, by binding the noble families together in a common covenant (s1e5 “Lancelot”), which suggests he brought a bunch of feuding families together under his reign. but then where are they now? it’s been like 30 years tops since Uther became king, they can’t have died out. actually we KNOW they haven’t died out because they keep sending able-bodied young men to be knights in Camelot! but WHERE ARE THEY????

[aethersea]

so since we’re all Supernatural blogs now, here’s my decade-old hot take:

When Crowley takes over Hell, we are eventually shown a glimpse of what eternal damnation looks like in his kingdom: standing in line for an important but boring task, forever. While this is indeed hellish, and Hell-as-endless-bureaucracy is a valid take that can lead to cool stories, it doesn't fit the choices that Supernatural had previously made about demons & demon culture, which, although it was never delved into with any skill, consistently had a hard-on for physical torture.

No demons had ever displayed an interest in psychological torment, unless it was bound up in a lot of run-of-the-mill physical torment, to the point that when it came out that they'd gotten Dean to become a torturer in Hell, I was shocked and impressed by this unprecedented level of subtlety. Whenever demons had cared about the inner workings of any specific human's mind, it was always just so they could manipulate that human into doing what the demon wanted (e.g. sign a crossroads contract, or whatever Ruby was up to), not so they could find more personalized ways of torturing them.

You could argue, as I am sure many did at the time, that Crowley is just Not Like Other Demons, and finds dismemberment distasteful. I honestly don't remember enough about his characterization to have a stance on that, but you could counterargue that there is no way that this upstart crossroads demon is going to overhaul the entire system two weeks after claiming the throne just because entrails make him squeamish. His grip on that crown has to be tenuous enough as it is.

But that’s all just deck chairs on the Titanic, because the real reason Crowley’s Hell is a bureaucracy is that the writers (and/or execs) are rank cowards. They wanted Crowley to become a more sympathetic character, and they didn't have the guts to do that without flinching from the fact that he is a literal fiend from Hell. Psychological torture is more palatable at a glance than physical torture, just from the lack of viscera, and the showrunners wanted to make Hell palatable.

I mean COME ON, Crowley was only ever likable because he's played by Mark Sheppard! He's a bad person who does bad things, and does them so well and so cleverly that he's in charge of Hell now. Put up or shut up! If you want to make the demon sympathetic just do it! It’s okay if sympathetic characters do torture sometimes, it really is, especially if your show’s already pretty dark. You don’t have to be a big weenie about it.

[aethersea]

somebody do cool analysis off of how Breq learns non-Radchaai songs, sings them as a way of expressing her emotional state, doesn’t notice she’s singing half the time, and can only give us imperfect translations of the lyrics,

and Breq wears a non-Radchaai face, which often displays her emotional state, but she doesn’t notice it’s moving at all half the time, and can only give us imperfect impressions of what her face reveals.

[aethersea]

hey has anyone talked about how Ben felt, when Klaus came back from Vietnam? I hadn’t noticed it before, Ben’s so quiet, but I’m rewatching with my family and when Klaus tells Diego about Dave...Ben leaves. he walks away and vanishes, out of Klaus’ sight, to wherever it is ghosts go when they’re nowhere.

because for the first time since Ben died, Klaus was alone. Klaus did things without him. Klaus was in a war, Klaus got clean, Klaus fell in love. without him.