Tune, the Hero of Winds as seen in Hylias Protection!
He/him, asexual & aromantic
Link from Wind Waker, Phantom Hourglass, and Hyrule Warriors
"Borrowed" Linebecks coat and Tetra's red bandanas
He doesn't actually need that eyepatch, but he's so used to wearing it on ships that he keeps it on
Lost his right foot, has a wooden peg leg
Fought in the War of Eras, died to a turncoat during a minor battle
Has many small weapons on his person — a hunting knife in his left boot and under the left side of the bandana around his waist, and a pistol holstered on the right (given to him from Tetra)
Tune, asexual: Idk I think the only thing I'd find desirable about sex would be the intimacy. Yknow like that safety and *deep* connection between you and your partner
Captain, hypersexual gay man: yknow what else about sex is deep lmfaoooo
hp tune’s “Rewriting the Ending” gave me warm and fuzzy ‘chosen family’ feelings
[This is part of an on-going series in which I write about books I receive from Ylva Publishing in exchange for a review.]
Pick up this book if you like: people finding love in the midst of life crisis, class difference romances, character-driven plots
This book reminded me of … (aka if you liked x, give this book a chance!): Rebecca (Daphne du Maurier), Jenny’s Wedding (movie)
I’d suggest reading this: on a plane, on a much-needed weekend retreat (whether it’s to a nice inn like Mia and Juliet find in the book, or just to your bed)
from the publishers:
Juliet is an author with a deadline. A big deadline...and a ratty old backpack, and she's on her way to Belgium. Mia has a one-way, first class ticket to anywhere. Today anywhere happens to be Scotland. The one thing she knows is that money can't buy happiness, and she has no idea what does. A chance meeting in an airport lounge and a shared flight itinerary leaves Juliet and Mia connected. They've known each other for only twenty-four hours and they are destined for separate countries. How do you forge a future when the past keeps pulling you back?
Ever read Rebecca? Liked the setup of ‘two strangers meet and quickly fall in love while far away from home’? Enjoyed the ‘working out a complicated past to make a relationship work’ aspect of the story? Or maybe you like novels which explore class differences and/or drop their characters in fabulously luxurious settings. If you’re anything like me, it’s probably all of the above, with a heavy dose of uneasiness about how Daphne du Maurier treats her main character – I mean, the woman doesn’t even get a name, let alone a personality. Plus, even if you’re a fan of crime and mystery novels (which I’m not), there’s the whole morally dubious resolution of the plot.
If any of these things ring true with you, you should probably check out Rewriting the Ending. True, it is missing the definitely gay housekeeper, but that is made up for by two definitely queer protagonists. Other than that, it comes with all of the elements I liked about Rebecca, and makes do without the ones I’ve always wanted to ditch.
What really stands out to me is how Rewriting the Ending deals with the topic of freedom/choice and different class settings. It nicely manages to contrast the different constraints Mia and Juliet find themselves under, while playing with the different degrees of severity and permanence these come with. For example, Mia’s and Juliet’s different perceptions of travelling free from social inhibitions – like Juliet does – are discussed. While Juliet views being stuck in economy-class long distance flights as ‘a special kind of torture,’ Mia marvels at the possibility to not be socially accountable to one’s family. It was nice to see Juliet’s agency in this situation played up – in their first few hours together, despite complaining about the impossibility of her usual flight arrangements, she shows Mia countless small ways of enjoying a less ‘proper’ way of travelling – without having Mia be presented as the ‘poor rich kid with no life.’ While the benefits of Juliet’s independence are mentioned, any romanticisation of her life as a free-spirited travelling writer comes crashing down when she muses about her lack of a social security blanket which Mia’s family wealth, for all its drawbacks, always provides.
It is also nice that while the importance of class-based freedoms and inhibitions is clearly dealt with in Rewriting the Ending, these are not the only things that define the restrictions of Juliet’s and Mia’s lives. The closer they become, the more Juliet reveals her habit of keeping people at an emotional distance – and her worries about how this habit will affect her relationship with Mia. Bonus points to hp tune for not making this another story about a socially skilled, but emotionally numb rich person and the poor but relationship-wise love of their life. If anything, Mia is the empathetic person in this scenario, but really, I’d say that they both learn a whole lot from each other.
Most importantly, perhaps – they learn how to deal with the choices you don’t get to make. Instead of magically clearing away all the issues holding both of them back at the beginning of the novel (Juliet’s writer’s block, Mia’s impossible family and her emotional scars from losing a child), they learn to work through and around them. Including how to deal with those issues that can’t be cleared away – namely, Mia’s family who refuses to accept their daughter’s scandalous divorce and her relationship with a woman.
As is often the case, the treatment of identity and labels was a tiny disappointment amongst otherwise wonderful storytelling. I’ve somewhat moved away from wanting every character who expresses attraction to two or more genders to be labelled as bi (pan/omi/…). Just like there are people in real life who don’t like or need labels, I can respect that for characters in a novel I’m reading – as long as I don’t feel like it stems from biphobia or bi erasure. Unfortunately, Rewriting the Ending has a moment that definitely smells of erasure and… an understanding of bisexuality I find weird, at best. When Mia (after previously having labelled herself as bi, yay!) talks about being set up with the man she used to be married to, Juliet’s immediate question is regarding her sexual orientation. Aside from the implication that if a woman is attracted to you, another woman, she couldn’t possibly also have been interested in a relationship with a man at some point – seriously? This is the part to get hung up on? Not the part where two families arrange a marriage for their elementary-school aged children, without giving them, or their adult selves, much choice about it? Am I to understand that, were Mia ‘seriously’ interested in men (whatever that would mean – I’d think that as a bi woman, she probably is), she should have had no problem with that arrangement?
While I’m not crazy about this particular part, I still have to admit that the rest of the novel’s treatment of family relationships was intriguing, and very sensitively dealt with. Mia and Juliet both have their share of family traumas, and apart from all the other ways in which they learn from each other, I really liked to see them navigate those. Their relationship is portrayed as close, and supportive in a way that feels promisingly realistic – there are moments when they are anything but eager to offer or ask for help, and through a series of trials and errors, they finally learn to open up to each other. Mind you, that doesn’t mean this ‘opening up’ always results in the respective other swooping in and solving all of her sweetheart’s problems. On the contrary, quite a few of their decisions still need to be made by each woman individually – and that makes the moments in which they do lean on each other so much more convincing. That, on top of their own developing compatibility, both women also learn to live with and love each other’s chosen families, is a double bonus. I particularly liked the ‘adoption’ of Juliet by Mia’s driver-slash-honorary father Martin: “I would never turn down another daughter, but not if she’s going to disappear every time she feels frightened.” (p. 224) Previous family scenes have been riddled with family members telling each of the two main characters how they should behave, how they shouldn’t behave, and most of all, that they are accountable to their blood relatives with everything they do. Martin, on the other hand, welcomes Juliet, but leaves her the choice of turning away if she so chooses. His words tie the topics of choice and family, which run through the novel in often painful variations, together in a parcel that feels extremely comforting and healing.
