read your tags on my post about Inkheart and YES the division according to like moral alignments wrt the characters makes so much sense. Like, I can't imagine that Cosimo wasn't one of the main characters given how he is very clearly one of Fenoglio's darlings - which Capricorn also is, but in the same sense you would write a character who is meant to be the lovable idealist, and then you have a character you enjoy writing a lot because they don't subscribe to moral standards (that is very much Capricorn and Basta). The Prince (since, yknow, we do know that Dustfinger was meant to "just" a sidekick whose death shows the cruelty of the Fire-Raisers) as the more realistic hero who is not afraid to get his hands dirty but ultimately has genuinely good intensions. I do wonder what happened to him in the OG novel or with Cosimo - hell, I wouldn't even be surprised if Cosimo was meant to die in the sequel and that is part of why Fenoglio brings him back - the Prince, meanwhile? That's a lot more uncertain to me.
Oh man, everyday I wish we had like actual info about the novel. What we got is so contradictory too tho? Allegedly, it's a book for children, yet Mo refuses to talk about Capricorn's crimes in it to Meggie - like - is it because Capricorn is "real" now and Meggie couldn't stomach it, knowing these atrocities were committed by the guys who are currently holding them captive VS reading about it in a book where the characters are firmly stuck between the pages?
Anyway, iconic of Fenoglio to just let them live out their days, a true villain lover. I'm sure there's tons of allegories in that book (like, I stand by the Shadow being a medieval fantasy take on a weapon of mass destruction, because this work was canonically published after WWI where chemical weapons like mustard gas started being used and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki). Since (I think) you're Italian, you can say with more certainty what might have been some RL parallels that could be in such a work, but to me, this seems like the most logical conclusion.
Hiiii! Sorry if I didn't answer earlier but I was busy with family on Christmas's Eve.
Merry Christmas to you if you celebrate!
I am always so happy when I meet new people who are fan of Inkheart, because when I was younger and I discover what fandom were I didn't found one for these books so I was left with the desire to talk about them 🤣❤️😭
Speaking on the matter: the reason why I immediately didn't pick Cosimo as the main character until you said so is because, well, I feel I have not understood how the characters aged from when the book was written and when Inkspell starts?
Like, we can take Dustfinger's children as an example. We know they are supposed to be babies/toddlers in the books, they existed there but as Mo said to Dustfinger regarding Brianna, there isn’t a lot written about them. Since Fenoglio knew about them but don’t remember theirs name or anything, and didn’t recoignize who Brianna is at first until Meggie points that out, the two girls were probably background character not older than Jacopo- which is the age Dustfinger remember Brianna be when he left.
So, if we agree (I don’t remember if it is confirmed) that Fenoglio’s book was written decades before Mortimer brought it home, Brianna didn’t age between the time Fenoglio read the book and Mortimer read Dustfinger out of the book, but she aged ten years in the decade between when Mortimer read the book and Dustfinger’s come back?
This opens a very interesting can of worm about how time pass in a book, and if the years start go at out own speeds, and the characters start to age and live indipendently from what is written about them in the book, only when a Silvertongue read the words of this book out loud.
Which lead to my question: if Cosimo was a "young hero" when he died basically before Inkspell how young he was ten years ago? How young he was in the book?
We know that Violante, who is around 19 in Inkdeath, was just a very young girl in Inkheart OG. (I am calling it Inkheart OG to differentiate it from Inkheart, written by Cornelia Funke, as in the real book that is the first book of the trilogy 😅). We know that she was married very young and in Inkheart OG she was not even engaged, so we can suppose she was, what? I’d say not older than nine or ten years old in the OG book, if she aged with the same speed as Brianna. (And we don’t have any reasons to presume she didn’t). Cosimo, I think, isn’t a lot older than her in Inkspell. He is older, but not so much that he still isn’t called a young man. He might be maybe in his early 20s, given his description and character.
Admittely, if Inkheart OG was indeed a children's book, the fact that Cosimo might have barely been more than a boy in it was NOT a reason for him to not be one of the main character, quite the opposite. Maybe he was the young protagonist the young readers were supposed to relate with. A bit like Meggie in the late part of the trilogy, to be clear, where she doesn’t contribuite to the plot a lot but she occupies the “kid protagonist” role.
Indeed, if Inkheart OG was really a children book, it NEEDED some sort of young hero or protagonist or co-protagonist, there were not many others kids characters amongst the cast, since all the characters who were in theirs trend/early 20s in Inkspell (ten years later the end of the OG novel) were admittely to Fenoglio’s own words of God secondaries characters. (Brianna, Violante, etc.)
The fact that Fenoglio asks Violante questions about what Cosimo was like and seems to not even know him reinforce my theory that Fenoglio wrote Cosimo as a kid, only a bit older than how Violante was.
If he was such a favorite character of Fenoglio, why did he know so little about him and his personality and interests, when he knew so much about Dustfinger and any others characters?
It makes sense if Fenoglio wrote Cosimo as being not older than ten or twelve or at older a very young teenager, but by the time Fenoglio was in the Inkworld he a full grown adult.
Just like Dustfinger doesn’t really know Brianna because she was five when he left and she is fifteen now.
Of course it is possible that the OG novel just span multiples years and by the beginning, The Black Prince and Dustfinger were almost kids, and by the end adults. (and Dustfinger dead). This would make Inkheart a sort of “racconto di formazione” (sorry, I know there is a term for this in German but don’t know how to write it) and reinforce my (our) idea of the Prince being ONE of the protagonist. It is common for this type of “romanzo di formazione” to have a main character who goes from outsider boy to valorosi young man, but has to pay a big price in term in grief and loss to definitely become an Adult TM. The Prince as the orphan boy who grow up to become a leader of the outsider and Dustfinger as his best friend whose death is the definitive stone on their childhood seme like a typical coming of age story in a middle-age/fairy-tale setting to me.
Coming of age stories are usually directed to a more middle school/teen-pre-teen audience than to elementary school kids, which would justify Inkheart being darker in tone than your typical kids book.
Of course, there is also the fact that these books (and I mean the real trilogy) take heavily inspiration from popolar fairy-tales folklore (se: the whole Piper and stealing the children deal), and fairy-tales were DARK before being washed out and made to be something nice and wholesome by Disney. Since Cornelia Funke is clearly inspired by them (and it’s one thing I like about this serie’s writing and world-building) we can just suppose her character-author inside the story Fenoglio did the same.
And yet. Yet. I don’t intend to say children’s stories can’t be dark and gruesome because I still remember as a kid liking dark and gruesome stories very much. But. But.
Usually in children’s books, even in the most gruesome and dark one, there is a happy ending. Or at least some sort of hope that the bad guys will not win Forever, that even if the mains characters or one or more of theirs friends die, Evil will be punished for that. And you are right, this isn’t possible in Inkheart OG not only because we know Capricorn (and Basta!) live by the end of the OG, but because will, the Shadow makes him pretty impossible to defeat.
A popolar italian children’s author once write that you could literally talk to children about anything in books written for them except about one thing: the complete lack of hope for a better future.
And the Shadow imho might represent that. Dustfinger dead, Basta not had ed, Capricorn invulnerable thanks to the Shadow, the Prince is still fighting against unfairness in the world but is now alone-
except. Except. If Cosimo was still a young boy in the original novel, as I supposed him to be, and he was one of main cast, as you theorized, then MAYBE, maybe, the end wasn’t completely hopeless.
Because yes, the bad guys are winning and one of our hero is dead, but there is a young Prince (a REAL prince, noble born and powerful, not an outcast without real political power like THE Black Prince) that is kind and generous and brave, and he’s still a kid but when he’ll come of age and reign things will be different, people like Capricorn will not be unpunished anymore. People like Dustfinger will be avenged because finale the Law, the Power, will be in the hands of someone who is both good and brave, so the sad ending is just a moment. A moment between the end of the novel and the sequel that Fenoglio never managed to write in his own world, and that he tries to write through Cosimo’s resurrection from INSIDE the story, with the results that we all know.
So maybe Cosimo was supposed to be the one who would have brough down all the evil people in the sequel. He would have gone and found the flaws in the Shadow’s apparent invulnerability and to defeat in this way Capricorn and his men in the Sequel never written. Maybe he was supposed to do, in different ways but with similar results, what Meggie and Mortimer did in Inkheart (not OG).
Maybe the part played by Meggie in Inkheart first book of the trilogy and later by Mortimer in Inkdeath were all supposed to be played by Cosimo in Fenoglio’s mind, and that’s WHY Fenoglio start believing that Meggie and Mo were now his only hope to write a happy ending, and why the first thing he did in Inkspell when he saw Meggie in the world created by him the first thing he did was talking to her about the recently dead Cosimo and them asking her to help bringing him back. Because Cosimo, to Fenoglio, was hope. Hope for a future not still written and that he never managed to write.
maybe that’s why Cosimo’s second death and his failure hit him so hard at the end of Inkspell. It had bene not only the prove to Fenoglio that he wasn’t invincible and onnipotent, but also the death of hope, for him.
Thank you for this ask! It gave me the inspiration for many others Inkworld posting and meta, and even if not many people care about this type of posting on my blog, I am happy that there news people (new amongst the people I talk with, I mean, not news on Tumblr lmao) with whom I can chat about this stuff! Writing about Inkheart and Inkspell and Inkdeath on Christmas makes me happy.
Can I send you questions about Inkheart and related books too, to start some discussion? I could tag you in my future Inkblogging metas if you would be ok with that.
