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elizabethtarington · 5 years

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The Broken Pieces

Pairing: Male Human x Ace Male Incubus Warning:SFW (Angst, Depression, Mention of Death and Past Abuse) Word Count: 4328 Note: OkCryptid Collab Prompt from @thetravelerwrites. Here’s my humble contribution. I had an idea in my ‘idea book’ for a while and was happy to knock this out as a combo piece. I really wanted to create something like this and I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I hope y’all enjoy! Ao3 Version | My Website Version

“Alright, bud. Your profile is all set up.”

Mason poked his head out from the kitchen to give Jeremy, longtime friend and class of 2011 survivor, a quizzical frown, “What profile?”

Jeremy shook his head at Mason “I’ll give you three guesses. It’s been two years since you broke up with Maria. What kind of profile do you think it is?”

Mason went back to putting popcorn in the microwave, frowning slightly at the rotating bag of kernels. While it popped, he leaned against the doorway and watched Jeremy. The man with his furrowed brow was finger deep in some dating app as he swiped his finger across the screen. Mason knew his friend meant well, but he wasn’t sure he was ready for this kind of thing.

“I’m not sure the dating scene is my thing. It’s been the same song and dance. I meet some gal or guy and I end up dating them and then they hurt me and leave a pile of ash behind—I’m just not interested.”

“I totally respect that you don’t want to date, but you should at least get out there. Maybe meet new people.”

Mason sighed, “Is this because you’re leaving next month and you’re worried about me?”

Glancing up from the phone Jeremy met Mason’s gaze, “Can you blame me? You don’t really have anyone else, Mason. Maria kind of made sure of that.”

Mason was the first to break eye contact as pain flared up in his chest. Maria. Everything about her still caused bitterness and regret to burn in his veins and bile to well up in his throat. What had been so fun in the beginning had become toxic and abusive. A dull throb started in his head as he began thinking about it.

“That she did.”

There was a silence between the two friends. An understanding of the damage combined with a quiet desperation to fix it.

“I’m not going to pressure you, Mason—but I can’t help but worry that you’re going to disappear into yourself.”

Mason was worried too. He was worried that he was never going to be able to connect with a person ever again and that Jeremy really was his last and only friend. It was enough to make Mason outstretch his hand for his phone.

“Alright, explain this thing to me.”

A hopeful grin spread across Jeremy’s face as he shot up from the couch and practically danced into the kitchen beside Mason. Glancing away from the popcorn, Mason raised an eyebrow as he looked down at the dating app.

“OkCryptid? Seriously, dude?”

“What? You never thought about going on a date with a different creature? Are you speciesist?” Jeremy teased, playfully cocking his hand onto his hip.

“That’s not it, I guess I just never really thought about dating someone that wasn’t a human.”

“Well, time to get your feet wet my friend, maybe literally.”

Mason inwardly winced at his friends over-exuberance as he began showing Mason how to use the app. It seemed easy enough to navigate, but Mason didn’t want to look at it any longer once the microwave alerted him that the popcorn was ready. The monster dating app was definitely a far second to horrible movie night and snacks.

After the movie, Jeremy went home and Mason began flipping through profiles on the app and cringed repeatedly. Mason himself wouldn’t be bragging about his profile. Jeremy had chosen a picture he had snapped while Mason was driving. But the worst part about it was what Jeremy had written on his behalf. While the self-summary was spot on, Mason was a florist that liked to garden in his spare time, or play video games and movie nights, it was how Jeremy had made him sound like a quirky weirdo.

I love plants so much that I can tell you what each individual flower means and how to arrange them in a perfect bouquet for when I meet your parents.

“Jeremy, you asshole,” Mason muttered as he edited his description, removing that line completely.

He tweaked it seven times and reread it only to find he’d gone from random freak to completely uninteresting. If he were trying to find someone to date and they had this profile description it would be a pass for Mason. With that thought, Mason got ready for bed, fighting the feeling of oncoming depression and the stinging sensation of tears. As his head hit the pillow he hoped sleep would give him a moment of peace.

For three weeks, the app stayed on Mason’s phone, forgotten until a notification beeped while Mason was at work. He almost ignored it as he began trimming up some calla lilies for a wedding bouquet that needed to be finished by the end of the week.

“You got pinged, Mason.” Came a small voice from a pot of soil on Mason’s workbench.

Mason glanced at the alraune, Delpha. She was a small floral creature, that could easily be mistaken for a sunflower with a small face. She had come into his store, nearly getting stepped on in the process, to ask for a job. It had been a couple of years since then, but Mason had accommodated her in many ways so that she could walk from table to table, helping the plants grow and stay healthy with her magic.

Now she was helping him grow a new kind of flower hybrid that would be special to only his store. She was carefully placing seeds into the soil with her as sparkling green magic spread from her leafy hands, “I guess there’s no harm in checking it.”

Swiping the phone on, Mason stared down at the app’s notification with surprise. Someone had messaged him. Not just any someone, an incubus someone.

“What is it, Mason?”

A sudden onset of dry mouth caused Mason to struggle as he opened the app to look at the message and the incubus in question, “It’s a message from someone on the dating app my friend installed.”

“Oh? Which app? I’m partial to Monstr myself. I once went on a date with a mandrake root and you would not believe the night we had together.” Delpha jumped out of the pot, scattering dirt across the table as she moved to look at Mason’s phone. “Ohh! OkCryptid! Mason, I didn’t know you swung our way, towards us otherworldly creatures.”

“I-uh, I’ve always thought about it but then I met Maria and—”

Mason cut himself off, he didn’t want to discuss personal stuff with Delpha. Not about Maria at least. This incubus, however, was a different story.

His name was Vylixar but went by Vyl. He looked like a Vyl, Mason decided looking at the imposing creature. Mason had met several incubi and succubi over the years and their appearances weren’t exactly what most humans would consider the epitome of beauty. They often had scale-like skin with little horns protruding from their shoulders and elbows, but they came in a variety of colors. Vyl was a deep mauve with large spikes. His horns on his head looked sharp and pointed, curling from his head down to his pointed ears. In his profile picture was him revealing sharp fangs with what Mason assumed was a friendly smile on his short snout.

Mason turned the phone so Delpha could see, “What do you think?”

“Oh, he looks big and strong, although you might want to be careful, incubi often like to feast on energy.”

“I’ve heard of it, but never really educated myself on it.” Mason pulled his phone back to look at what Vyl had messaged. “Is it sexual energy? I don’t really have any of that right now.”

“It can be. I’ve heard that it feels good for humans when they feast on you. It can get addictive.”

It had been a while since Mason had felt good in any respects. Every day felt like he was just struggling to hold on to what little he had left. Maybe this is a risk he should take.

Quickly glancing over the text, Mason wrote back his response, double and triple checking his words trying to not sound like an idiot. He hesitated to hit the send button but finally pressed send after rereading his message one more time. After he did so he put his phone down, anxiously waiting to hear back as he went back to preparing the wedding bouquet.

Another notification made Mason’s phone beep as he was about to wrap and pin the ribbon onto the bouquet.

“Would you like to have dinner with me?”

Mason could feel his palms start to sweat, but his reply was instant ‘Yes’. ‘Vyl is typing’ quickly turned into another message back asking if tonight would work for him. Mason was astonished at how much Vyl wanted to meet him. Despite himself, Mason was getting excited, the sooner he met Vyl, the better.

He messaged back that he was available and no sooner had he sent the message did Vyl respond with a date and time. Confusion at the location made Mason raise his eyebrow. It was a bakery just down the street from where Mason worked, he had even been there to help with a cake order that required several rose heads that a bride had specifically wanted. Had Mason already met Vyl before? He didn’t recognize him at all.

After work was finished, Mason headed home to clean himself up a bit and put on a button up shirt that he always liked. Maria hated it. It was blue plaid that made Mason look like a lanky roadie is what she had said, usually wrinkling her nose in disgust. She would then suggest a plain and professional button-up shirt.

“Fuck her,” Mason growled, buttoning the shirt up a little more fiercely. “I look good.”

Mason had finished inspecting himself before he was out the door and arrived at the bakery. Vyl had said 7:30 but as Mason stood outside the bakery he frowned up at the closed sign. The bakery had already closed and had been for nearly an hour. Mason was ready to believe that he got tricked when he saw a hulking incubus with large clawed feet walk towards the door.

He unlocked it and smiled, his yellow glowing eyes looked Mason up and down as he opened the door, “Mason?”

“Uh—yeah. That’s me.”

“Hi, please come in.” Vyl moved to the side, keeping the door wide as Mason shuffled into the bakery. “Sorry, I was running a little bit late with the cleanup in the bakery and preparing dinner. I hope you don’t mind.”

Mason glanced back to see Vyl locking up before he walked past him into the back, “Come on back, I’m just starting to finish up cooking.”

Uncertain and a little concerned, Mason gave pause at the situation. Vyl owned the bakery? And was cooking dinner for Mason?

“Uh, Vyl?” Mason asked wandering into the back to see an expansive setup. Several tables were placed throughout the expansive space, where little fairies were sprinkling sugar on cookies while others were turning cakes as they were being decorated with colorful icing and decadent chocolate.

“Don’t mind the sugar plum fairies, they do a lot of the work at night. We won’t be eating down here though, my little flat is just above the shop.”

Mason continued to follow behind, taking one last peek at the fairies and the massive kitchen. It had several silver machines that Mason assumed were for mixing and preparing the pastries and cakes. He also had never seen sugar plum fairies before and was fascinated at how they seemed to really enjoy rolling out fondant together.

Up a set of spiral stairs, Mason finally followed Vyl up to a different floor that had a large red door propped open. The enticing scent of food made Mason’s stomach growl loudly enough that Vyl glanced back and chuckle.

“Feeling hungry?”

“I am, actually.”

“Good, I’m glad you brought your appetite. I should have asked beforehand, but are you allergic to anything?”

“Uh, no. I’ll pretty much eat everything. My friend says my stomach is made out of lead.”

Vyl smirked, “Well, my cooking isn’t atrocious, so hopefully you won’t have to put that theory to the test.”

Vyl opened the door again, ushering Mason forward into the flat. It was spacious and well decorated much to Mason’s surprise. He didn’t know what to expect but he certainly didn’t think Vyl’s place would be so homey. Vinyl records decorated the walls, mixed in was some jazz posters in thick black frames. A flat-screen was bolted into the wall above a small white painted fireplace and sitting across from it was a couch with two other chairs surrounding a glass coffee table.

“Can I get you a glass of wine or maybe a beer?”

“I won’t say no to a beer.” Mason nodded as he took off his shoes before he followed Vyl into the kitchen.

The kitchen was similar to the one in the bakery, stainless steel appliances that were polished and cleaned to a pristine shine like no one had been using them. He watched as Vyl opened the fridge and pulled out a beer and popped the cap off easily before handing it to Mason. With his nerves starting to make him want to bail, Mason gratefully took the beer and took a sip, surprised at how smooth the dark liquor went down.

“Wow, what is this?”

“Ah, that is a St. Bernardus Abt 12. It’s good right?”

“It really is, I don’t think I’ve tasted anything like this before.”

“Well, don’t drink that one down too fast, it’s got a high alcohol content and on an empty stomach that beer will go straight to your head.”

Vyl smiled at his comment as he washed his hands. His hands quickly found their way to a blade as he began to chop some vegetables and throwing them into a large bowl with some leafy greens.

“Can I help with anything?”

“No thank you, I should be fine. But if you don’t mind, I could use the company.”

Mason nodded, “Sure thing.”

Silence had filled the air with only Vyl’s chopping to compensate for it before Mason took one more swig of beer before trying to talk, “So, do you own the bakery? I’ve actually worked with you guys before for that rose cake for a wedding about a year ago.”

“Oh! Are you the gentleman from the flower store down the street?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Well, fancy that. I had no idea. I’m usually in the back downstairs making the cakes.” Vyl stopped as the smile that had appeared, faded quickly. “My late partner used to deal with the customers so you probably saw him.”

Mason’s eyes went wide as he watched the large incubus pause as he threw the remaining vegetables into the bowl before turning to wash the cutting board in the sink.

“Your late partner.” Mason murmured as he tried to remember the person he met. A picture of a young man with long hair tied into a long braid came to mind. He had glasses and a soft kind smile as he had greeted Mason and discussed business with. Lucas. That was his name. “Lucas.”

“Yes. Lucas. My wonderful partner.”

“When did he pass?” Mason asked, carefully watching Vyl as he walked to the oven to check on a large roast.

“It was a year ago—on this day actually. A heart attack of all things. The man was fit as a fiddle, yet his heart had a blockage.” Vyl stared intently at the roast, sticking it with a thermometer, “I hope you don’t mind—it’s just that I really needed someone tonight. I needed to feel like this place was a home again with a cooked meal and with someone to share it with.”

Vyl paused, “I’m sorry if you’re disappointed or you were hoping for something more than just a meal.”

“No. No. Vyl, don’t apologize.” Mason’s brow furrowed, his heart ached for the incubus in front of him. He understood the pain and he understood the need for companionship even if it meant this wasn’t actually a date. Whatever preconceived ideas Mason had about Vyl feeding on him just so he could feel good was gone. “I get it. I really do.”

“You do?”

Those glowing eyes turned to Mason with shock and lingering sadness as tears had been forming in the corner of his eyes.

“I do. Honestly, I’m not ready to date anyways. I got out of a bad relationship two years ago and I haven’t really been the same since. My friend Jeremy put the app on my phone because he’s worried that I don’t have any friends and he’s concerned that I’ll be lonely since he’s leaving in a week.”

Vyl let out a small breath of relief, “Lucas would have done the same which is the only reason I installed the app myself. I can hear him in the back of my mind, pushing me to move on, but it’s hard. Even harder is to find someone who would want to date me anyway.”

“Why do you think that?”

“I’m-uh, not like other incubi. I don’t really do the sex thing. Ever. I just don’t have an interest in it, I’d much rather have a companion who doesn’t mind snuggling on the couch to watch some movies or maybe will go on walks with me while we indulge in ice cream. I still need to feed occasionally, but it’s very rare for me since I’ve gone what most of my kind consider ‘vegan’. I eat human food for sustenance.”

Vyl stood up, closing the oven door, reaching for his own glass of wine as he took a sip.

“That—honestly sounds what I want right now.” Mason shuffled from side to side, inwardly admiring Vyl’s bravery for being honest with him, all while feeling a little guilty that he had come here without thinking that perhaps Vyl was a person and not an object to magically make Mason happy. He didn’t want sex, but he wanted to feel good. He wanted to feel happy again. “I don’t have much interest in anyone sexually either. Not after my ex. Honestly, I just feel—”

Mason stopped himself. There he was, bringing up that woman again.

“Did you want to talk about it? I mean, I’m a stranger or a potential friend, should we enjoy each other’s company—but sometimes talking to a stranger about your problems is easier than talking to your friends. I’m less involved in what happened.”

Taking a deep swig from the bottle, Mason struggled until it spilled out, “I’ve always been a bit more reclusive than most people, so I figured dating someone who was the opposite of me would help me to come out of my shell a bit more. Maria was my opposite. In every way. She wasn’t very good for me and really enjoyed hurting me by putting me down. Near the end of our relationship, I questioned whether it was just in my head or maybe I was emotionally fragile and just sensitive. Maybe I was just not good enough for her. But what broke everything was when I found out that she had been cheating—as if the verbal abuse wasn’t enough. I really wasn’t enough for her. She even blamed me when I confronted her about it. It was—bad. ”

Another profound silence settled between them as Mason did his best to keep his eyes on the floor. He was struggling to reign it all in.

“Oh—Mason.” Vyl said softly. “Can I give you a hug?”

Mason nodded immediately as he felt the welling of emotions inside of him. She had cut him up into tiny pieces and he just didn’t know how to put himself back together again. For a moment as Vyl wrapped his arms around Mason, he felt as if he might just be able to do it. He might become whole again, one day.

Unexpected tears and sniffles began to plague Vyl as he held Mason tightly. It only made Mason respond in kind, burying his face into Vyl’s chest to hide his own tears. They both stood in that kitchen, clinging for their own reason to continue on as the fresh home cooked meal reminded them of care and warmth. Tonight it was enough to share a meal together. It was enough to share each others company.

They pulled apart, both quickly wiping their own tears away before Vyl laughed, “Look at us. What a horrible meeting this is.”

Mason sniffed, letting out a chuckle, “No, it’s actually pretty great.”

“I’m sorry that she hurt you so deeply.”

“Yeah, me too.” Mason nodded, “Honestly, I’m pretty sure I should go see a therapist. This kind of baggage is heavy and I don’t want to burden anyone with it.”

“That’s understandable and probably the healthiest solution.” Vyl turned to open the oven and check the roast once more, “Ah, I believe that dinner is ready.”

“Great, I think all the crying made me hungrier than I was before.”

Vyl laughed, “Crying can be good for the soul, but I can relate. I think I’m hungry after I blubber—at the very least, I’m thirsty.”

Mason felt a wave of relief as he watched Vyl grab two sets of plates, handing one to Mason before setting the other one down. He picked up a carving knife and fork, cutting large slices of steaming roast and plopping two onto Mason’s plate.

His mouth watered as he stared at the hot beef, his stomach also letting out a resounding grumble of approval, “Wow, this looks delicious. Where did you learn to cook or bake?”

“I went to a culinary school a long time ago. Since we incubi have long lives, I’ve been in and out of school for centuries, picking up new things and recreating the old.”

Vyl handed Mason cutlery as he ushered him into the dining room across from the living room. The table was small with four chairs and four placemats already set on the surface. Mason had wondered if perhaps Vyl was the one who placed the little vase of fake flowers in the middle or if it was Lucas.

Setting down his plate, Vyl walked to the kitchen, coming back with the bowl of salad and several dressings pressed to his chest before he set them all down.

“I didn’t even think about how long you live. So, have you been vegan for long then?”

“Yes, actually. I just never enjoyed it like others of my kind did. So, I just didn’t do it. Occasionally the mood strikes where I wouldn’t mind feeding on a person, but it’s very rare. Because of that, I learned to cook and get nutrition from food. It only made sense to learn to cook or bake to earn money while I eat to survive.”

“Makes sense to me.” Mason smiled, cutting into his roast before taking the first bite.

It was glorious as the savory flavor hit Mason’s taste buds, “Wow. This is really good.”

Vyl’s smile grew large as he watched as Mason began cutting up his food more to get another piece into his mouth, “I’m glad—Lucas definitely appreciated my cooking as well.”

“Was this his favorite meal?”

“It was.” Vyl paused, “I’m sorry, I just feel really guilty about this ‘date’. Like I’m using you.”

“Well, join the club. I feel like an ass because I originally came here thinking that I might feel good if you fed off me. “

Vyl let out a hearty laugh, “A date where both parties were looking to ease their own pain and suffering by using the other. How romantic. This could only lead to good things.”

“From the looks of it, we might become ‘cry buddies’.”

“Cry buddies,” Vyl chuckled again, “I like it. It really brings out a softer side.”

Dinner had turned into a late gabfest with Vyl showing Mason how to make a cupcake with buttercream icing. They talked about everything from their past relationships, to video games, books, and movies. Mason even was pleased to discover that Vyl was interested in incorporating more real flowers into his baking displays. They had a lot in common and when the evening drew to a close they exchanged numbers before Vyl showed Mason out of the bakery with a box of cookies and their cupcake creations.

“I really enjoyed tonight. It’s not what I thought it would be.” Mason spoke first, pausing at the door as Vyl unlocked and opened it.

“I did too. I’m probably as surprised as you are.”

A silent pause descended on Mason as he stared down at the box in hand before meeting Vyl’s gaze, “I know I sound like a broken record, but I’m not ready to date. I’m still not really in a healthy place where I should be dating, but I want to see you again as a friend. Is that okay?”

Vyl nodded, a small smile toying at the corners of his snout, “I would like that very much, Mason. Do you think we could meet up on Sunday? I could show you how to make cookies.”

Vyl ruffled Mason’s hair playfully as Mason felt relief flood through his body.

“I’d like that.”

“Cool. I’ll text you later then. Have a good night and please get home safely.”

Mason nodded as he stepped outside, “I will—oh and Vyl?”

“Yeah?” Vyl paused before closing the door.

“Thank you. Truly.”

“Thank you too, Mason.”

Mason began walking away with goodies in hand as he heard Vyl lock up. He felt lighter than he had in a while and decided to text Jeremy about how his evening went. He ended the message with a quick note that he was going to be just fine. For the first time, Mason knew it to be true.

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Also if anyone wanted to use this for the collab, feel free. It’s super dorky, but I spliced it together with this person’s creation from Pixabay.

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thewriterandthewitch · 7 years

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Audrey knows best (MadWife)

One short fanfic.

Laura x MadSweeney (MadWife)

Rating: Teen and Up. (Mentions of sex)

Summary:

Laura returns to her best friend's house to ask for another favor. This time, she brings a tall leprechaun with her.

You can read it here or in ao3.

Audrey knows best

“Have you had any new hallucinations?”

The psychologist asks the question she has been asking her every week and Audrey shakes her head, in a mute “no”, while she fixes her eyes in the ugly butterfly-shaped pin the woman wears on her lapel.

Rhonda Machado may be an exceptional psychologist but she has a horrible fashion sense. She doesn’t ask another question and Audrey looks up, confused and impatient. She knows the game her psychologist is playing: Silence makes everyone uncomfortable and if Rhonda lets it fill the room for too long, Audrey will end up confessing her most disturbing thoughts. The problem is that it always works.

“Why a zombie? Why couldn’t I hallucinate her as she was before she died?” Audrey shakes her head. “Sewing her arm back was positively disgusting.”

“I don’t know. The mind is a complex mechanism. Do you want to venture a guess?”

Audrey shrugs. “Maybe I wanted to punish her… so I imagined her as a corpse. She was always too pretty outside, too ugly inside.” Even as she says it, she feels a little bit guilty, but she swallows it back.

“Why were you friends then, if she was too ugly inside?”

“I was naïve. I thought she was unreachable and cruel to men but genuine to me.” She laughs, letting the anger rein free. “I was so fucking stupid.” Audrey blinks, allows herself to be lost in her own thoughts and then, she rushes to apologize. “I am sorry for my vocabulary.”

“You can swear if it makes you feel better.”

It shouldn’t but it fucking does. And only for a second, Audrey understands her dead former best friend – because Laura loved to use the crudest words to describe everything. She looked delicate outside but she had such a dirty mouth. Men loved that.

“I always envied the spell she had on men. They smiled at her as if she was the most enchanting princess they had ever met and they just felt the need to protect her at any cost. Shadow wasn’t an exception. Laura smiled back at them, she batted her eyelashes and seduced them in her own subtle way – but it was never real, you know, she liked the attention but she never really cared about them.” She shakes her head, feeling suddenly sad. “Shadow wasn’t an exception.” She repeats.

Audrey remembers when Zombie Laura told her Shadow was the light of her life, and now she wants to laugh hysterically again, but she contains herself.

When Audrey leaves her psychologist’s office, she doesn’t feel better – or saner for that matter. She understands that Laura was only a hallucination, a product of her mind, but she still can remember the pungent smell and the sounds of her bowel movements. It was so disgusting that it’s difficult to accept it wasn’t real.

She decides to go buy food and some ingredients to make pies. She knows she still has plenty of apple pie in the fridge but making them has become her latest obsession. Once, before her life became a fucking Greek tragedy, she loved to decorate scrapbooks – now, the mere sight of colored paper makes her want to puke. Cooking is therapeutic; it saves her from her thoughts, her anger, and her tears.

Audrey only spends half an hour in the supermarket and she arrives home just before the sunset. When her car reaches the driveway, she’s surprised to find a heavily damaged ice truck parked in front of her house. Audrey grabs her grocery bag and steps out of the car without taking her eyes off the ice cream truck.

She almost shrieks when she recognizes Laura Moon, her particular zombie hallucination, in front of the wheel. She looks alive, or dead, or something in between – a little bit worse for wear than the last time she hallucinated her. Audrey hugs her grocery bag against her chest and starts walking toward the main door with urgent steps.

“Audrey!” Laura calls after her, getting out of the truck.

“No, no, no, no. You’re not real!” She screams, not stopping for a second.

Audrey allows herself only a quick peek, to check if Laura is still there. She is and she isn’t alone. A very tall redheaded man descends from the copilot seat and leans against the hood. He has scratches on his face and he looks quite intimidating. The man reminds her of the rough-looking lumberjacks and hunters from the covers of her romantic novels.

“What…?” Laura starts asking but Audrey slams the door in her face.

Safe inside her house, Audrey takes a deep breath to calm her fast-beating heart. She moves toward the kitchen's window and positions herself in a spot where she can still see them without being seen. She watches in silence how Laura returns to the car to grab a box of chocolates and then, she brusquely “hands” it to the tall man, hitting him in the stomach with it.

“Why do I have to bring the chocolates? She’s your friend!”

“Because you smell… well, not good, exactly. Just slightly less disgusting than me.” Laura answers. “I don’t want the chocolates to smell like expired meat.”

The man snorts, a prideful smile forming on his face.

Laura stops in front of her door. “Audrey, I’m very embarrassed I’m doing this again but… I need your help. I brought… I brought some peace offering.”

“I don’t think a box of chocolates will make her forget you died with her husband’s dick inside your mouth.” The man retorts and Audrey nods, agreeing with him, even when he can’t see her.

Laura sighs but doesn’t contradict him. She keeps speaking to the closed door. “We’re going to stay here, waiting, until you open this door. We aren’t going anywhere.”

Audrey shakes her head, furious. She opens the main door and looks at Laura with hate.

Laura smiles as if everything was fine with the world. “Hello, Audrey.”

“You’re dead… and rotting on my doormat.”

Laura simply nods. She seems unperturbed about this fact and Audrey considers it a clear sign that she’s just a product of her imagination.

The redhead turns lightly towards Laura. “I thought she already knew.”

“She does.” Laura looks back at Audrey. “You know. Remember? We had a heart to heart, first in the bathroom, then in your car.”

“Yes. I mean… no.” Audrey shakes her head. “I talked to my psychologist and we decided that you were a product of my imagination. It took weeks, weeks, you hear me? But I finally came to terms with the fact that you weren’t real, that I just made you up because I was feeling guilty for hating you so much when you were dead and buried.”

Laura sighs and shakes her head. She walks into the house without asking for permission. A putrid smell hits Audrey when she passes in front of her so she steps back and covers her nose with her hand. Laura shows her a resigned and even self-deprecating smile.

“If I were only part of your imagination… would I smell so bad?”

“I assure you she’s real. She wouldn’t be such a pain in the ass if she weren’t.” The tall redhead man says.

Audrey blinks at him, “And who are you?”

“Mad Sweeney.” He says, offering her his hand to shake.

“Mad?” She asks while she shakes his hand.

He nods. “Mad as a hatter.” He says, showing a smile that seems too long and two white-teethed for his face.

Without bothering to ask permission, Laura turns the AC on with such strength that she almost tears the wheel off. “Cold is good to conserve cadavers, you know.” She explains. Audrey doesn’t know what to answer to that so she simply nods. Laura moves her hand over her collarbone, where the seams are opening and Audrey can see her bones. “Audrey, I know you still hate me and you’re in your right… but as I said, I need another favor.”

Audrey folds her arms and looks at her former best friend with apprehension. “Is it the car, again?” She holds back from commenting that Laura’s truck is a complete mess.

“No. We need to stay here for some days. It won’t be for long…” Laura shoos away a fly that’s circling over her head. “Well, he needs a place to stay. I will come and go. I have some… errands to do.”

“What kind of trouble are you in? And I don’t want more lies, Laura, I’ve had enough of your secrets…”

Audrey observes how Laura and Mad Sweeney exchange stares. He nods, answering Laura’s mute question. Audrey looks at their wordless understanding with unconcealed surprise. In all the years she has known Laura, she has seen multiple guys trying to form an emotional connection with her but their stares and smiles were always one-sided. Laura smiled back at them but in the same way than an actress smiles at her co-lead, they were never genuine smiles.

“He betrayed a god so he needs to hide somewhere,” Laura explains as if she were explaining the plot of a new movie.

Audrey raises a brow. “A god?”

“A Nordic god, to be more precise,” Sweeney adds. “A one-eyed manipulative son of a bitch with a penchant for storms.”

Audrey shakes her head and looks at Laura with anger, “That’s the lie you want to feed me? You’re hiding from a fucking god?”

Laura extends her arms, showing the marks of her body. “Is that really so difficult to believe?”

Audrey bites her lip, trying to resist the temptation of believing her. Hallucinating her dead best friend is one thing, believing in the existence of a dangerous Nordic god is something else entirely.

Audrey looks at Mad Sweeney with an expression of mocking disbelief. “And what are you, then? A genie?”

“Do I look like a sodding genie?” He asks, deeply offended. “I am a leprechaun.”

She raises both brows, not even trying to hide her skepticism. “A leprechaun? Well, you don’t look like a leprechaun, either. Shouldn’t you be more…?” She gestures with her hand, indicating the size of a kid or a dwarf.

“Don’t even say it. Nobody likes stereotypes.” Sweeney says, with an almost threatening tone.

“So about that favor… what do you say?” Laura asks with a pleading tone. It’s an odd expression in her face, something Audrey hasn’t seen before.

Once again, Audrey bites her lip, meditating. She smiles with courtesy at Sweeney. “Do you mind if I talk with Laura in private?”

Sweeney gestures with his hands, expressing that he doesn’t mind. Audrey grabs her former best friend from the arm and pushes her towards her bedroom. Once they’re inside, she locks the door.

“Who is he?”

Laura blinks, confused. “We weren’t lying. He’s actually a leprechaun.”

“No. Who is he to you?”

“A travel companion. That’s all. He needs something I have, I need his guidance… more or less.”

Audrey looks at her with disbelief. She knew Laura. She knew Laura’s relationship with men – it was always a sordid, depressing and very basic-needs affair.

“Is that how they call it nowadays?”

Laura raises both eyebrows, surprised as if the thought had never crossed her mind. “It’s just a platonic business arrangement and I’m married.”Audrey looks at her with a face that clearly says: ‘are you fucking with me?’ Laura shakes her head and for a moment, she even looks embarrassed. “Well, I am dead and I am pretty sure my vagina isn’t in the right position anymore.”

“So how does that work? You being alive when your organs aren’t in the right position…”

“Long story short: I have a magic coin inside my belly that’s keeping me alive. Ginger Minge here wants that coin so he’s trying to find a solution. Meaning: Resurrection.” Laura stops to swallow a worm that has crept through her throat to her mouth, and continues. “He took me to the goddess Easter but she said she couldn’t resurrect me because I was killed by a god who calls himself Mr. Wednesday.”

“You met Easter? You mean… like Happy Easter? Bunnies and Chocolates?”

“Yes, she’s very nice but useless for what I need… I haven’t given up, though. I will fucking hunt God himself if that’s what it takes.”

Audrey frowns. “What the hell happened to you? When you were alive, you were the biggest atheist I knew and… now you’re looking for God? We live and then we die and we rot. Those were your exact words.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly wrong,” Laura answers, caressing one of her scars with the tips of her fingers.

“You’re also hanging out with a damn leprechaun and running away from gods, and you tell me all this with the biggest conviction.”

“Yes, now I’m a great believer. Whatever. This world fucking sucks and gods aren’t much better… but I don’t have time to discuss religion, ok? So can he stay?”

Audrey looks at the closed door, remembering the strange leprechaun that’s still waiting in her living room. “Can I trust him?”

“He won’t hurt you,” Laura says.

Audrey notices that she didn’t exactly say she could trust him and, for a second, she considers throwing them out of her house but she doesn’t - because lately, her life has been an endless cycle of pity parties and boring days. She needs a distraction and she’s damn curious, too. It’s probably a horrible idea to offer refuge to a leprechaun who has infuriated some dangerous gods but the idea of knowing about that world and not being part of it is even more distressing. She’s tired of being in the dark, so she nods.

“Yes, you both can stay.”

Laura smiles, looking relieved. Audrey doesn’t return the smile – they aren’t friends again. She only nods her head, as if this was a business transaction, and moves to open the door.

Audrey steps out of the bedroom with a friendly smile and looks at Mad Sweeney, who is still waiting in the middle of her living room, holding the box of chocolates:

“Apple pie?” She asks.

+++

The three of them sit at the table, around the apple pie. Mad Sweeney is eating as if this was his last day on earth but Audrey can’t swallow even a bite because she can feel Laura’s strong scent in her taste buds. The silence is uncomfortable and, for a second, it reminds her of her therapy sessions.

“So… are you from Ireland, then?” Audrey asks, trying to be nice.

Mad Sweeney looks up, surprised that she’s addressing him. “There’s no one more Irish than me in this country, deary.”

“What about your parents? Did they immigrate here, too?”

This time, he seems really shocked by the question, “Nobody has ever asked me about my parents before.”

“Please, don’t get all emotional on us now,” Laura tells him, cruelly. Mad Sweeney gestures at her with his big hand, as if he was shooing away a fly.

“Actually, I haven’t thought of my parents in a long time… I was human once. A king, you know?”

Laura rolls her eyes but Audrey bends over the table, interested. “You mean a real king? Crown on your head…?”

“Aye, and a throne under my butt.”

Audrey feels tempted to tell him he doesn’t look like royalty but she doesn’t want to offend her guest.

“What happened to your kingdom?” She asks, instead.

“People killed it – when they stopped believing in it. That’s the worst way of killing someone, you know, forgetting them.”

Audrey nods, understanding. She may have never been a queen but she knows how it feels to be forgotten.

“I know what you mean. In some way, I was forgotten too.” She looks at Laura, who seems busy making a mess of her apple pie with her fork, without eating it. “My husband cheated on me with my best friend. The two people I loved the most forgot all about little me… they took me for granted, disrespected me and fucked each other when I wasn’t looking.” Furious now, Audrey looks at Laura. “Was the sex good, at least?”

Laura, looking resigned and guilty, shakes her head. “Not at all.” She says. “He was too insecure, especially with his tongue, always wanting to please.”

“Fuck you, Laura.” Audrey spits out.

Instead of feeling out of place, Mad Sweeney makes himself comfortable on the chair and looks at them as if they were the protagonists of a popular soap opera.

Audrey, however, feels embarrassed by her fit of anger and she looks at Mad Sweeney with mortification. “I am really sorry. That was very uncivilized of me.”

“Civilized is overrated,” Sweeney says.

“He’s more foul-mouthed than the two of us combined. Believe me.” Laura says but Audrey avoids looking at her. Laura rolls her eyes. “Come on, Audrey. What do you want me to say? I’m sorry?”

“Why did you do it?”

“My cat died and…”

“Okay, and my grandmother died five years ago and instead of having an affair, I spent my Christmas bonus on comfort food.”

“He was close, he was just there…” Laura tries to explain.

Audrey shakes her head. She looks up at Sweeney. “Boy, you had bad luck!” The leprechaun nods in agreement although Audrey hasn’t explained yet what she means. “You lost your opportunity to ride the whore. If she had been alive during your road trip, she would’ve jumped your bones… just because you were there.”

Mad Sweeney raises a brow; he seems more amused than uncomfortable.

“For God’s sake, Audrey…” Laura exclaims and she looks at Sweeney’s amused smile. “And you, drop that smile, I wouldn’t have fucked you even if you were the last penis on earth.”

“Are you sure? You have a weird obsession with my prick.” Sweeney pretends to be recalling the different moments. “First, I go to pee, there you come… wishing to take a peek, I’m sure. Then, you hold my balls in your hands…”

Audrey opens her eyes wide, surprised.

“Over his pants!” Laura specifies, for Audrey’s benefit. Then, she looks back at Sweeney. “And do I have to remind you I was aiming to hurt you and not give you pleasure?”

“Oh, darling… but there’s such a thin line between pain and pleasure.”

“Really? Next time, I will make sure to crack them.” Laura shakes her head and looks at Audrey. “As you see, he’s a disgusting piece of shit. I would never fuck him. Dead or Alive.”

Laura sends a heated stare toward Sweeney, challenging him to contradict her. However, it’s Audrey who talks:

“I would.” She says, shrugging.

“What?” Laura asks, confused.

“I would fuck him.” Audrey specifies. She sends a seductive smile towards Sweeney, who looks adorably surprised.

Laura shakes her head, uncomfortable, disgusted and for some reason, angry.

+++

Audrey shows her a small room, a lot smaller than the one where Sweeney is staying. It has a big window, though, which will help with her putrid smell. Laura touches the pillow with her fingers and tries not to remember all the times she stayed over for a girly sleepover with Audrey.

“It’s a good thing you have so many spare rooms,” Laura says, with an uncharacteristic shyness.

“Yes, we bought a big house because we wanted a big family. Good thing it never happened, though.” Audrey answers, with bitterness.

Laura nods, looking guilty again. “You should tell Mad Sweeney you were joking, you know. If you don’t want him to come to your room in the middle of the night…”

Audrey smiles, making Laura even more uncomfortable. “How old do you think he is?” Audrey asks. Laura immediately recognizes the tone of her voice. It’s the same she used during college when she asked Laura to find out if a boy she liked was an artist, a law student or a computer geek.

“He doesn’t look over forty.” Laura answers.

“Yes, but he’s a leprechaun… isn’t he like 200 years old or something? Like the vampires from the movies.”

“Maybe. Maybe older. I think he said once that he came to America in the 18th century.”

“Can you imagine how experienced he’s in bed?” Audrey asks, with a naughty and too curious smile.

Laura doesn’t answer, she just shakes her head and Audrey moves toward the door, getting ready to leave for her own bedroom. Laura doesn’t want the conversation to end on that note, though, so she calls her name. Audrey stops at the door, with her hand on the handle.

“He killed me. You know?” Laura says. “I thought my death was my fault but he was the one who caused the accident. Divine intervention, because a god ordered him to do it.”

Audrey frowns. “Why are you helping him, then?”

“Well, unfortunately… I need him.”

Audrey raises both brows. It’s the first time that she hears Laura saying that she needs anyone. Laura recognizes the expression on Audrey’s face and she shakes her head.

“No. I don’t need him in the abstract sense of the word. I need him for a very specific reason: My resurrection. He’s the guy who knows everyone – every god, in this case, and where they live. He’s just a very convenient GPS... so I need him alive until we find a solution to my alive-inside-a-rotting-corpse situation. The problem is that he has the tendency of awakening the fury of very powerful gods.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I thought you should know who he really is… before you do something you can regret.”

“Oh. I see.” Audrey says. “I guess I was wrong.”

“Wrong about what?” Laura asks, confused.

“I thought you brought him as a peace offering: ‘Here you have this Sex God, have sex with him and be so grateful that you will forget that I fucked your husband.’ That would be your thought process – you’re messed up enough for that.”

“He’s not a Sex God.”

“Not literarily, maybe, but good enough for a mere mortal like me,” Audrey answers with a small smile. “In any way, it’s obvious you don’t want me to have sex with him.”

“I don’t care if you have sex with him.”

“No. It’s pretty obvious you don’t want me to… because you like him.”

“That’s absurd. Haven’t you heard us arguing before? He’s annoying as hell.”

“He killed you and you are still traveling with him. More than that, you’re protecting him from a god he pissed off… it’s the most selfless act I have seen you do in your whole life.”

“It’s not selfless if I have very selfish reasons to do it!”

“I thought you said you met Easter. I am sure she knows all the gods, too… which means you don’t really need Mad Sweeny and still, you don’t seem to want your revenge.” Audrey smiles, triumphant. “You like the leprechaun, Laura Moon.”

Laura shakes her head. “You’re wrong, but think whatever you want.” Laura puts a lock of her hair behind her ear and tries to talk with innocent indifference. “Does your very wrong assumption mean you’re not going to have sex with him?”

“What? No. As I already told you once: Fuck your feelings, Laura!” Audrey shows her an evil smile. “Sweet dreams.” She says, before exiting the room and closing the door.

Laura stays frozen on her spot for several seconds, trying to understand what she’s feeling and thinking. Death has made her more emotional – which it’s so fucking ironic. She doesn’t need to sleep anymore but she likes to pretend that she could, if she wanted to – so she lies on her back on the bed and looks at the ceiling as if she could see the stars there.

She doesn’t care if Audrey and Mad Sweeney have sex – but for some odd reason, she does. She’s a possessive person, and even when she isn’t interested at all in Mad Sweeney - or that's what she tells herself - she still likes to think he’s hers somehow. Her travel companion, her ally, her killer.

She pays attention to the silence, trying to hear steps or whispers outside her bedroom, but three hours go by without any noise. The fourth hour, however, breaks the quietness of the night. Outside, in the hallway, another door opens and Laura sits up on her bed with all her senses alert.

She immediately recognizes the leprechaun’s heavy steps and before she can realize what she’s doing, she’s opening her own door and looking at Sweeney with a very unfriendly expression. He jumps, surprised by her sudden presence, and takes some steps back.

“Fuck, Deadwife! You should wear a sleigh bell.”

“What? Are you scared of ghosts now?”

“Nah. The dead don’t scare me.”

“Where are you going?” Laura asks, her voice piercing and accusatory.

“Just going to the loo. Wanna come and take a look at my prick?”

Laura shakes her head, feeling more relieved than disgusted. She glances at Audrey’s closed door.

“I think I will take a rain check.”

“Maybe some day, Dead wife.” After these words, he starts heading towards the bathroom and Laura watches him walk away. She stands there until he enters the bathroom and closes the door behind him.

Laura glances at the closed door of Mad Sweeney’s bedroom and in a split second, she makes a decision.

+++

The first thing Mad Sweeney notices when he returns to his bedroom after taking a leak is Laura’s smell. It’s fucking impressive, in the worst way possible, that the thick walls that separate his bedroom from hers aren’t enough to protect him from her smell.

He sighs and doesn’t even bother to turn the light on. He’s so tired that he feels his bones aching and he just wants to lie on the bed and let his mind wander. He takes his shoes, his pants, and his shirt off; and throws them to the floor. It’s a natural ritual that he has done for years, but when he finally gets comfortable under the sheets, he feels his back touching a smooth-but-cold-as-ice something. A shiver shakes his whole body and he jumps out of bed, cursing under his breath.

“Can you stop screaming like a baby girl?” A familiar voice asks.

Mad Sweeney blinks, trying to adjust his eyes to the darkness. There, in front of him, lying on his bed is Laura Moon: As dead as always, as angry as ever. The leprechaun looks around the room, trying to figure out if he went to the wrong room but no – this is the guest room with the mustard yellow colored walls and the closet with the creaking door.

“What are you doing here?” He’s so tired he doesn’t even have the strength to insult her.

“Don’t jump to the wrong conclusions, Ginger Minge. I’m not interested in bumping uglies with you.”

“Well, then you’re the queen of the mixed signals, considering you’re in my bed.”

“I’m trying to save my friend from making a mistake. She’s grieving and emotional and she’s not thinking clearly.”

“I suppose I’m the mistake.” He says and Laura nods. “You always find new ways of insulting me. Well, fuck you… or better not, because I would rather not touch your moldy skin.”

She smiles, “You always find new ways to insult me.” She spits back at him. “What are you waiting for? Get into bed!”

Sweeney doesn’t move for several seconds, remembering the coldness of her inert body. He’s tempted to throw her out of the room with insults, curses and his picturesque vocabulary. He obeys her, instead. He’s not sure why - there’s simply something in her eyes that’s demanding and pleading at the same time and he doesn’t find the courage to disappoint her.

The bed is big and he tries to stay as far away from her as possible. The horrid smell reminds him of the boat that took him to the new world and he wonders, with bitterness, why every journey he starts includes companions with poor hygiene. It’s not Laura’s fault, he knows, but blaming her gives him a pathetic satisfaction.

“You’re going to fall from the bed if you keep moving farther,” Laura says, with a tight voice that indicates he has offended her. He doesn’t answer, but he creeps closer to her.

The silence dominates the next twenty minutes and, for a second, Sweeney thinks Laura has defeated her own death and has finally fallen asleep. Of course, it’s just wishful thinking. She clears her throat before talking:

“I don’t think this is a good hiding place for you. We will set off tomorrow to look for another.”

Sweeney doesn’t bother to ask her why. He thinks he knows. “Trying to protect your friend from the big bad leprechaun? And here I thought you were a crappy friend.”

“Well, better late than never.”

Laura is lying and she knows it. She’s still an asshole, a lepre-cunt. She doesn’t care for Audrey’s wishes or wants – not if they interfere with her own. She wants to be better but right now - as she lies in the darkness, listening to the silence and expecting Audrey to barge into the room with a nightie - she can only think: 'I can be better tomorrow. Tonight, I will be just myself.'

#madwife #fanfic #american gods #laura x mad sweeney #laura moon #mad sweeney #audrey burton

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khaleesi-in-the-north · 7 years

Text

In the Crosshairs (20/?)

@lanasexuall

“They snuck up on me, so I did what any normal woman would do: I chucked my chocolate bar at one and kicked the other one in the balls. Then I kneed him in the face, but the other caught me from behind. Coward that he was, he pinned me against the wall while the other cuffed my hands and tape my mouth. Tossed me in the back and sped off. The passenger took off his mask and it was fucking Jon! Got Gendry pretty good though,” Ygritte had told her.

She said that they told her it was for her protection. The Lannisters would be after her because of her association with Jon. “Fuck him. I have a life too you know! He can’t just uproot me from it.”

Starting that day Margaery and Ygritte received more freedoms. They were allowed to walk the hallways under guard. Wherever they were looked like a home of some sort. The rooms had nice furniture, there were televisions. The only hint that it wasn’t a home was the large room that Margaery had peered into one day. It had a large desk, papers everywhere, and a mounted sword in the corner. It almost looked like a typical office.

Margaery never forgot she was a prisoner and this was her pretty little cage.

She refused to let the food and amenities fool her. On her excursions out of her makeshift cell, shee studied the hallways. She noticed they wouldn’t lead her down certain halls. She made mental notes of them.

Gendry walks her to Ygritte’s room. As they pass the office, Margaery overhears Sansa talking on the phone. “I’m going to leave in the morning…Yes, Mrs. Tyrell I’ll let you know immediately if I learn something…I hope so too…Thank you, Mrs. Tyrell…buh-bye.”

Gendry doesn’t notice the conversation so Margaery pretends not to. It didn’t sounds as though Alayne’s trip would be short.

This was an opening. Alayne’s associates would be distracted preparing for her trip. Though the chance was slim, they could be caught off guard by an escape attempt.

Gendry opens the door to let Margaery in. Ygritte sits on the floor playing solitaire as a man Margaery hasn’t yet met flips through a magazine. He glances at Margaery then returns his attention to the magazine.

Ygritte smiles up at her. “Poker?”

“Sure. You deal,” Margaery says.

Ygritte gathers the cards and shuffles. “I used to kick ass at the big tournaments until Mayor Stannis banned gambling at bars.”

Margaery nodded, but her attention was on the guard. “ You think he’s cute?” she whispers.

“Huh?” Ygritte furrows her eyebrows.

Margaery watches for the man’s reaction. He continues flipping the pages as though he hadn’t heard anything. “Yeah would you do to him?”

“What are you talking about?” Ygritte flips the cards.

“His cock is probably too big for my liking.”

He keeps flipping the pages, unaware of Margaery and Ygritte’s conversation.

“I think we can get out of here,” she whispers again.

Ygritte eyes the guard and lowers her voice. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. We just need some time.”

“We don’t have time. I overheard Alayne speaking on the phone. She said she’s leaving.”

“Leaving where?” Ygritte deals the cards.

“I don’t know. We might not have an opportunity like this, especially if they take us north,” Margaery looks at her hand. An Ace, a jack and a ten.

The guard glances at them, then flips to the next page of his magazine.

“I have family North of the Wall. If we make it to them, we’re free,” Ygritte held up her hand. “I raise 2 dragons.”

“I call and raise 5 dragons,” Margaery says.

“I call and raise 8 dragons,” Ygritte says, then whispers.

“North is too risky. There’s too many Stark supporters. We have to move South. To Dorne.” Margaery looks over her cards. “Check.”

Ygritte looks over her cards. “Check.”

“How are we supposed to do this?” Ygritte asks.

“Improvise when they change the guards. Then follow the halls that they keep us from,” Margaery suggests.

“So pray that we get lucky?” Ygritte simplifies.

Margaery nods and draws a card. “What’s the worst they’ll do to us?”

Ygritte snorts too loudly. The guard looks over. Ygritte draws another card, “I raise 15 dragons.”

He goes back to his magazine, oblivious to their ruse once more.

“Easy for you to say,” Ygritte responds, “You’ve been fucking the Boss.”

Margaery flinches at the reminder.

“Sorry,” Ygritte apologizes.

She’s been struggling to separate the Alayne she knew from Sansa Stark. She tried convincing herself that she hadn’t felt what she felt. She couldn’t deny that she loved Alayne. That she still was in love with Alayne. Alayne was gone though. Replaced by this mafia boss murderess, she wasn’t coming back. Margaery could tell herself that she hated Sansa more easily than she could deny her feelings for Alayne.

“I call,” Margaery says. She draws another card. Ygritte does the same. “Want to fold?”

“Nope,” Ygritte smiles. “Check.”

“Check.”

Ygritte reveals her hand. “Full house.”

Margaery pouts. “Damn.” Ygritte opens her mouth to rub the loss in Margaery’s face, “That would be such a great hand if I didn’t have a royal flush.”

************************************************

The plan is simple enough. Ygritte has a size advantage on Arya and can catch her offguard. If she can knock her as hard as Brienne whacked Margaery, they should be fine. If’s are never as precise as Margaery would like them to be.

In comparison, her task is simpler. Her grandmother would easily pay Bronn double whatever the mafia is paying him. She just needs to convince him of that.

Jon clicks off the television. Margaery only watches when there’s news about her brother. She doesn’t trust what he tells her. She glances at the clock. His shift is ending.

There’s a knock on the door. The copper knob twists and the door opens. Sansa, wearing a thin green sweater, Margaery’s sweater, and jeans walks in. Jon leaves. On his way out, Margaery catches a hint of an encouraging smile on his lips. It irritates her. She feels a scowl form of its own volition. She neutralizes her expression before Alayne turns back to her. Without Bronn her plan is useless.

Alayne looks as uncomfortable as the last time she visited. She looks small and vulnerable, unsure of whether she should sit or remain standing.

Margaery’s not inclined to help her. She wants her to hurt the same way she’s hurting. She to apologize for what she said last time. She wants to twist Sansa’s heart and break it like she did with her own. She wants to throw herself into Alayne’s arms and be held close.

Above all she wants the truth. Learning the truth will cement her anger. Then she can forget her confusing feelings. There won’t be this inner turmoil. She can move past these lies and allow her self to loathe without the questions gnawing at the back of her head. Was this your plan from that start? Was any of our relationship real? Why me?

She stares at Sansa. Sansa sits in the chair that Jon, Gendry and Bronn usually occupy on their shifts. Her fingers play with the hem of her sleeve.

“I’m sorry,” Alayne says, barely louder than a whisper.

Nothing.

“I drove to Renly and Loras’s house after you. I thought you’d gone there. You weren’t. Then Bronn called. He said Cersei had ordered some hit men to take out Jon with whatever means necessary. She contrived to get Gregor Clegane here for the job. I told Bronn to call Jon. He was working with some associates in Flea Bottom.” She sounds cold and detached until she turns to Margaery. “Then I remembered you. I didn’t know how much time I had to get to you. I called Arya and told her to get you away from the apartment now and that if you were hurt…

“Brienne said Renly jumped in front of the bullet.”

“To save Loras,” Margaery snaps.

She didn’t mean to say anything. Alayne looks at her with what Margaery calls pity. “The bullet’s trajectory would have hit Clegane-”

“Loras was in front of him,” Margaery repeats.

“It was an accident,” Alayne pleads with her to understand. She gets up and walks toward the bed. The light gleams off of a round metal object in her back pocket. There’s two rings, like handcuffs.

A new plan pieces together in Margaery’s head. For it to work, she couldn’t say what she believed: Sansa was the reason he died. He’d still be here if she had been truthful or left her alone that night at the bar.

Margaery watches her sit on the bed next to her. The rings push up in her back pocket. “What do you want from me?”

Alayne clasps her hands in her lap. “To understand. If I bring him back I would Margaery. I’d bring back everyone the Lannisters took from me. I can’t. That doesn’t mean I won’t destroy them.”

Margaery scoots closer. “Destroy them? Did you have anything to do with Joffrey?”

Margaery knows she did. The way she acted around him makes sense now. Sympathy bubbles in her and she reviles the feeling. She shouldn’t feel bad for a murderer.

“It was to protect you,” Alayne defends. Margaery bites back the urge to scream that she doesn’t need protection. “He made my life hell. He deserved to die.”

Margaery didn’t need to know the details of how. If she did, she didn’t think she could go through with what she was going to do. “If I hadn’t been around him, would you have had him killed?”

Alayne hesitates then nods. “He was a monster. You don’t know what he’s done, what he’s capable of. The world is a better place without him.”

“If you had let him be, he’d have landed behind bars with his mother,” Margaery murmurs.

Alayne narrows her eyes. Her jaw tightens. “Bronn told me of his plans. He wanted to kidnap you. He and Cersei argued over whether to trust you with your story. He said he could manipulate you like he had me. And that if you wouldn’t cooperate he’d strangle you until you did. I couldn’t let him take another person I loved.”

That’s her cue. Margaery tilts her head and leans in slowly. Eyes half closed, she sees Alayne’s eyes widen in surprise. She starts with a soft kiss, barely pressing her lips against Alayne’s. She inches back and closes her eyes before pressing her lips against Alayne’s once more. This time Alayne presses back.

It’s tempting to give into the familiarity. She wants to forget everything and go back to a time when she could pretend that Alayne had loved her. Margaery places her hand against Alayne’s lower back.

Alayne kisses her harder, more desperate, but still slow. Whatever her intentions are to use Margaery now, they won’t matter if Margaery gets what she needs first.

Margaery smooths her hand down Alayne’s back, up and down. She opens her eyes. Alayne’s eyes are shut tight, almost painfully so. Her hand brushes against the tip of the cuffs. Margaery hooks her pinky around the end.

She just needs to get one cuff on Alayne and the other on the bed. The cuffs jingle in her hand. Margaery jerks the cuffs back to herself. Not fast enough. Alayne pins her wrist to the bed and snatches the cuffs back.

She steels her eyes. Sansa looks at her, hurt filling her blue eyes. Margaery expects her to call in whomever is on duty.

Sansa puts the handcuffs down beside her. “Margaery, I love you. And I know you’re mad and hurt. You love me too.”

Margaery shakes her head. “Don’t pretend that you ever felt anything for me.” She blinks back the angry tears threatening to stream down her face.

“I do love you. Please believe me,” Alayne begs. Sansa begs. She doesn’t know whom.

The first tear falls. Then another. Sansa reaches forward to wipe it away. Margaery flinches back from her. “How can I believe anything you say? You lied to me for a year. Were you ever going to tell me?”

Alayne looks down.

“That first night at the bar. Why did you come to me? Why couldn’t you let me be?” Though it’s pointless to hide her tears now, she tries anyway. Eventually an associate will come in and she doesn’t want to give them the satisfaction of seeing her so weak.

Sansa opens her mouth, shuts it, and opens it again. “I wanted someone to help me forget who I was, just for a night. I wanted to be someone else. I didn’t for us to fall in love.”

Margaery laughs, high and sharp like a bark. “What we have isn’t love. You don’t lie about who you are to the people you love. You don’t kidnap them. Do you even know what love is?”

Something in Alayne snaps. “I know a hell of a lot more than you! You act like you know so much and then push people away once they get too close. I don’t fucking run away from my feelings like you do!”

Margaery felt the jab, but took it in stride. “You mean your blood lust and vengeance? Those feelings? No it’s much better to be a fucking murderer and drug pusher isn’t it! Queenpin Sansa Stark: the casualties don’t matter as long as she gets her way.”

Sansa gets up. “If I had told you I was Sansa Stark from the beginning, what would you have done?” she yells.

Margaery stands up and meets her eyes. “I would have ran as far from you as I could. I wish you had chosen a different plaything that night. Renly would be. Loras would be safe. I never would have fallen in love with someone who doesn’t exist, because I don’t know you.”

Admitting the truth felt cathartic. Deep down, Margaery knew she couldn’t deny her love. But the woman she loved disappeared as soon as she learned her girlfriend was not what she wanted the world to know her as.

Alayne walks around Margaery and picks up the cuffs. She turns them over in her hand. “Go.”

Margaery blinks. “What?”

Alayne doesn’t look at her. “Go. Take your first two left hallways then a right, head straight for two turns then left. Just go.”

The insane urge to comfort her washes over Margaery again. She doesn’t understand why she keeps feeling this way.

Alayne is letting her go. Part of her feels like it must be a trap. It’s a worth a shot. Margaery turns and leaves. The halls are bustling this way and that. People carrying boxes and equipment brush past each other. None of them pay notice to Margaery as she slinks down the halls.

She wonders if Ygritte made it out.

She rounds a corner at the same time as Jon and Brienne jog around the other one. To escape recognition, she ducks back behind the corner, praying they won’t notice her. They’re speaking to each other in soft voices.

“-she will go?” Brienne finishes her question.

“I have no idea, but I guaran-” Jon doesn’t finish before he’s beyond her hearing range.

Margaery makes it out without running into anyone else. Outside, the sun is beginning to dip behind high-rise, rundown buildings. She looks at the building behind her. It’s as rundown as the rest of the buildings despite how nice and modern the inside looks. An easy way to blend in without alerting the Lannisters of their presence.

She goes left. Not knowing where they were, she and Ygritte hadn’t made plans on where to meet. Getting away from the mafia is first priority. She turns the corner and runs down the street for a couple blocks.

She slows to a stop, panting. A car rolls up next to her and honks. The black vehicle with tinted windows looks far too nice to belong to this part of town, wherever she is. Margaery tenses up, thinking back on her self-defense training. Because the only person with a car that nice around here would have to be part of the Starks.

The window rolls down. A red head pops out and grins. Ygritte tilts the sun glasses she somehow came across. “You gonna get in?”

Margaery runs around the car and gets in. She buckles up as Ygritte speeds off. “How did you find the keys.”

Ygritte tilts her head to the steering wheel. There’s no keys. “Told you. I can hot wire almost anything.”

“And the sunglasses?”

Ygritte smiles wide. “Found them in the car. They suit me don’t they?”

“Not as well as your ones back home,” Margaery says.

Ygritte stops at the red light. “How’d you get out? I saw Bronn in the hall after I knocked out Arya.”

Margaery looks straight ahead. She doesn’t want to think about the Starks or Alayne anymore. There are more important things for her to take care of. Loras. Her articles. “It doesn’t matter. I got out and I’m not going back.”

Ygritte nods. She’s never been one to push too hard, especially since Margaery hasn’t once asked her about Jon beyond her initial questions that Ygritte didn’t want to answer. They both still feel raw. Margaery is grateful for that.

Margaery turns on the radio. She flips it from the news station to a rock station.

Ygritte rolls her window back up. “Get comfortable Tyrell. It’s a long drive to Dorne.”

#sansaery #in the crosshairs #sansa stark #margaery tyrell #sansa x margaery

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thekisforkeats · 3 years

Text

Neverwinter Afternoon (Let All the Broken Pieces Shine, Chapter Six)

Info: The Magnus Archives, D&D AU. JonMartin, more ships to be added. Rated T. Post-Canon. Jon is amab nb and uses they/them, Martin is a trans guy, Tim is a trans guy.

CWs: Lying, self-doubt, sex (mentioned), manipulation (mentioned), apocalypse (mentioned), stabbing (mention), character death (mention), self-recrimination, arguments, guilt, child abuse (mention of Martin's mother), emotional manipulation (mentioned), fire (lighting a candle), blood (mentioned), knives (mentioned), shouting, law enforcement, fantasy racism, physical conflict

Summary: Martin and Jon get to Faerun, finally, and run into some trouble...

And a (new) old friend.

-------------------------------------------------

First Chapter Previous Chapter

On the other side of the portal is an oddly clean back alley. Martin can hear the bustle of a street nearby, and the air is heavy with the scent of blossoms interlaced with hints of salt air. It’s warm, and he guesses it might be late summer. It’s… a city. A normal, living city.

It almost makes him want to cry with relief.

He takes a moment to take a nice, deep breath and then glances down at himself to see what color his clothing is. Red, he notes, with gold trim, the threads actually shimmering. It’s nicer than anything he ever wore back home; he guesses maybe linen? With goldwork, which is probably gold-plated silver thread, but still. It’s got to be terribly expensive. And he’s supposed to go adventuring in this?

Jon has taken a few steps away, dropping their joined hands, to look around the alley. Their outfit is much more practical, a soft green tunic and brown trousers beneath their leather armor. At least Martin won’t have to figure out how to wash Jon’s clothing; it looks like it’s probably rough-spun cotton.

Martin sighs, and puts it out of his mind. Something to figure out along the way. He pulls his backpack off and absently attaches the Harper pin to it before opening the flap. He’s suddenly aware that he’s hungry, and although it hasn’t hit fully yet it’s going to soon enough.

There is no food in the pack. Well, isn’t that just lovely. There is, however, a sheaf of papers that he pulls out to look over.

“I don’t have any food in my pack,” he says to Jon. “Do you have any in yours?”

Jon pulls their pack out and starts to go through it as well. “No,” they reply. “Given the nature of the place we were in, I’m not surprised. I’m not sure anything that would provide nourishment in that land would last into this one.” Well, they’re not wrong. Food from the Shadowfell is supposed to be pretty awful.

Martin’s distracted by realizing what he’s holding in his hands. It’s not just that he has a Harper pin; these papers are proof that he is, in fact, a Harper. Agent Blackwood by name, and there’s not only proof of identity but lists of code words and such, so that he can get by pretending to be an actual Harper if he meets one. It occurs to him that the Raven Queen might just know about his penchant for lying about his qualifications; does she intend for him to lie his way into the ranks of the Harpers?

“What do you have there?” Jon asks, frowning and peering at the sheaf of papers.

“Oh… just… papers. Nothing important.” Martin’s gotten bad at lying to Jon, if only because he doesn’t want to. His voice has gone up an octave or so. Jon is going to know.

“Martin…” Jon says it in an achingly familiar tone, fond but stern, a tone usually reserved for when Martin’s being ridiculous and refusing to go to sleep or something. They walk back over to Martin, punctuating each step with a word. “What. Do. You. Have?”

Martin sighs. He can’t reasonably hide this from Jon. “They’re… an identity. A false identity, I’m guessing, or maybe impersonating someone with the same name.” He pauses. “Look, you remember that pin I was so happy to get?” He gestures to the Harper pin on his pack. “That’s a sort of badge for the Harpers. They’re… I mean… they’re sort of spies, but sort of helpful mercenaries, they’re like… they go around doing good and meddling in politics, in service of a whole array of good deities. Like I said, sort of a good-aligned spy network.”

“So, what, you’re some sort of… Faerunian James Bond?” Jon asks, arching a brow. Martin had explained some of the basic terms while they were traveling to Evernight. “What deity do you serve? Do you just… know? I suspect we just got through meeting mine.”

“Well… technically, no, because, umm, these aren’t… me. These are documents claiming I’m this… other guy. Agent Blackwood.” Martin scans the documents, puts most of them back in his pack and keeps the lists of code words out. “As for deity, no idea, the Raven Queen mentioned Sune but she’s… umm…” He blushes, his entire face suddenly hot. “She’s the goddess of love and beauty. Like, uhh, like Aphrodite but with red hair.”

“Love and beauty? Sounds like it’s right up your alley,” Jon says, grinning at him. “If the requirements of the faith involve ‘being good at kissing’ or ‘being ridiculously handsome,’ you’ll be at the top of the church hierarchy in no time.”

Martin gapes at Jon, and the blush only increases. Jon being so free with compliments isn’t fair. Not that Martin exactly thinks he’s ugly, or anything, but he just can’t quite wrap his head around the idea of being all that physically appealing. Then again, Jon’s ace, so maybe they just mean it aesthetically?

The thing is that while Martin and Jon did have more of a physical relationship than Martin had ever expected, in that short time they were together in Scotland, once everything changed, Jon changed too. Jon had gone from being willing to have sex because it felt good and they wanted the emotional connection with Martin, to being unable to do much beyond cuddling. Which Martin had been fine with; it wasn’t like he’d felt much in the mood himself, trudging through fear domains.

So it’s been a while since Jon has really… flirted with Martin, the way they’ve suddenly started to, telling him he’s handsome and making vague (and sometimes clumsy) innuendo. For all Martin knows, that’s all the further it will go, and he’ll accept that; he’s always told himself he’ll accept whatever Jon had to offer.

Still, it will be awfully nice if they can go back to what they had in Scotland. Flirting, and cuddling, and more if Jon’s up for it. And more than that, all the little domestic things… making food together and doing laundry and just being together. Their entire relationship’s kept getting hijacked by events, and Martin’s very much looking forward to managing to build something that will last.

Besides, Jon’s pulling off the whole “shadow elf” thing really well. Their skin might be a dark grey now, their eyes completely black, but their hair is as long and lustrous as ever, and it all adds up to be something compelling in an almost goth sort of way. Not that Martin’s going to tell Jon that, as such. But the fact remains that he’s just as attracted to Jon as he’s ever been, and it’s really distracting after six months of celibacy.

Especially when Jon’s teasing him the way they are.

Jon’s going on in a completely normal tone, as if they hadn’t just made Martin turn as red as his hair, “So the Raven Queen wants you to impersonate this other agent? Interesting. I mean, it might be necessary to open up avenues for our involvement in this…” They shrug. “Quest? This is a quest, isn’t it?”

Martin decides to busy himself memorizing the passcodes, because his ears are still red and they have practical matters to attend to. “Yes,” he mutters, “this is clearly a quest. And anyway, it’s very workable, the Harper thing. I know everything I’d need to know, and people in Western Faerun tend to assume that a bard is one of Those Who Harp anyhow.”

“A bard?” Jon asks. “Music, dancing, oration… I take it there is more to the position than attending court?” They’re obviously probing for information; there’s a hunger in their expression, not the unnatural hunger the Eye had encouraged, but just Jon’s own desire to know things, and their joy at being able to figure out something they don’t know.

“Think more like… traveling storyteller and entertainer, yes, but also with…” Martin looks up at Jon. “Think about… music in Tolkien. The way it heals and soothes.” He smiles, eyes lighting up a bit. There’s a reason he’s always loved bards. “Music to make magic, Jon. D’you understand?”

Jon nods. “I think I do, yes.” They smile and then go on, “What am I? From what you can gather? Some sort of priest? Or… dark priest?” They gesture to their eyes.

Martin shrugs as he looks back down to the paper. “You’re a warlock. Always have been, really. Sworn to dark powers for knowledge and power.” He says it in a more off-hand manner than he really means to, not realizing that it might not be so obvious to Jon.

Jon looks at him sharply. “What? No. That’s… I wasn’t a warlock! Warlocks are evil… the word itself means ‘betrayer.’” Their dark eyes are huge, almost pleading, their expression filled with horror. “You’re joking, right, Martin?”

“Not all warlocks are evil,” Martin replies patiently. He’s trying to memorize the passcodes. “Some of them serve evil powers, yes, but some do so even if they don’t want to, and there’s like… the Archfey, and other more… oh for God’s sake, what does it matter now?” He’s not sure why he’s irritated. Jon’s worried, and he should comfort them, but he just… suddenly can’t seem to muster the energy. How can Jon not see what they’ve been?

“It’s a matter of perceptions, Martin!” Jon exclaims. “That creature that sent us here isn’t evil. Iis she?” Their face twists. “Please tell me she isn’t evil.”

Martin thinks it’s a little late for Jon to be asking about that--maybe they should’ve figured it out before making a bargain to save his life--but he says, “Lawful neutral.” He’s surprised by how tired his own voice sounds. “So, no, balanced between good and evil.”

It all crashes in on him at once--the things they’ve been through, the pain, the horror, the thing he had to do. Jon had walked through the apocalypse and took out revenge on those who’d hurt them, and then refused to do so when a truly horrible man, Simon Fairchild, had hurt Martin instead of Jon. They’d come to him for comfort again and again, but then in the end… in the end, Martin had to kill them, and then cling on desperately while getting dragged to an unknown destination.

Martin shouldn’t feel betrayed by Jon. He shouldn’t. But he does, and he doesn’t know what to do with it. And he knows he just does not have the emotional capacity to comfort Jon, right now. He’s so tired, he’s just so tired, they’ve been walking through The Literal Apocalypse for months and he’s burned out and he just wants to get these passcodes memorized and then figure out what to do about this new thing they have to go do.

Wasn’t he feeling happy just, like, five minutes ago? The emotional whiplash is disorienting.

Martin looks up. “Jon. Has it occurred to you that maybe some of the choices you’ve made lately have been on the evil side?” He regrets the words as soon as they’re out of his mouth, but then stubbornly decides he’s not taking them back. Jon chose the Panopticon over him--and even if that’s not what was going through Jon’s head that’s how it feels to Martin--so they can just… deal with the implications.

Jon doesn’t even flinch. They merely stand there pondering Martin’s words and then sigh. “Oh… you’re right…” They, too, suddenly sound very tired. “I’m sorry. So… I’m a warlock in service to the Raven Queen. How well known is she in this world? I gathered the sense that she is rather secretive.”

Martin blinks at Jon. He hadn’t been expecting them to agree with his words. Gnawing guilt starts to eat at him; Jon blames themself for so much, they don’t need Martin adding to it. He focuses on answering the question. “I… well… she’s not… well-known? People know of her, but not the common people. I don’t…” He frowns. This is distracting him from finishing what he’s doing with the passcodes, and he’s getting hungry. (Maybe that’s why he’s throwing around such nasty accusations?)

“Look, Jon, we can play Twenty Questions all you like soon, but I really need to memorize these and then get rid of the paper, and then we need to go find some food and decide if we’re going to spend some gold on a bed in an inn or start traveling.”

Jon stands silent for a moment while they let Martin continue to memorize the things on the paper. Then they start to drift toward the exit to the alley, talking to themself as they go. “But… I’m not evil anymore… right? I saved the world… or, well, no, I tried to take Jonah’s place in the Panopticon… Martin saved the world. I attempted to play god again… subjugate the Fears towards the End. That’s… that’s not something a good person would do…” They sigh.

Martin glances up and sees an expression of suffering on Jon’s face. He has an irrational bout of irritation--Jon’s saying everything he’s been thinking, and he suddenly feels the way he used to when his mother would mumble some passive aggressive diatribe about what a burden she was on everyone, just to get sympathy. He could never tell if she really believed it or not, and some part of him knows Jon’s really feeling as guilty as they sound, but he ignores it for the moment. He really does need to finish what he’s doing.

Jon continues after a moment. “And even before things went to hell… I perpetuated the expansion of the Eye, fed on statements from unwilling victims…” They sigh. “Not to mention everything I did after Prentiss’ attack on the Institute…” They actually kick at a bit of gravel in the alley. “I suppose ‘warlock’ fits rather well, in light of all that.”

Martin, in the meantime, has finished memorizing the codes. He pulls a candle out of his pack and casts about for something to light it… and then it occurs to him. He’s a bard. He knows spells. The words and the gestures just come to him, and moments later he’s cast prestidigitation, and the candle’s alight.

He has to take a moment to just take that in. It’s so… cool. He can do magic!

Then, so he doesn’t waste the candle, he puts the documents to the flame.

He doesn’t look at Jon as he says, “Are you trying to get me to come give you a hug and tell you to stop feeling sorry for yourself? Because if so, you’re being awfully obvious about it.”

Jon turns to look at him sharply and then shakes their head. “No. I’m trying to justify my own feelings of… I don’t even know.” They sigh again. “It’s just… I didn’t give much thought to my actions when they were going on. Now that I’m being labelled as a ‘betrayer,’ it’s rather illuminating that everything that I’ve done…” They pause and shake their head again. “No, that’s not true. Not everything. But a great deal of the things I’ve done haven’t been exactly the most virtuous of acts.”

“Well, now’s a hell of a time to figure that out,” Martin mutters as waves off the last bits of the burned paper and snuffs out the candle. “Anyway, it’s not like you should go around telling people you’re a warlock. We’ll just… I don’t know… we’ll figure something out.” He needs to stop taking out his pain on Jon, he knows that, this isn’t as much Jon’s fault as they think it is. He stuffs the candle back into his pack and fastens it back up, slings it onto his back.

Jon reaches up to put a hand on Martin’s shoulder. “I’m sorry. Truly. I put all that pressure on you. And put you in the position I put you in without thinking about you and your feelings. I just--I don’t--you don’t have to stay with me, if you don’t want to. I would understand. After all the things I’ve done, if you want to go and live your life here, I would understand.”

Something just… breaks in Martin. How can Jon possibly think he wants to leave them? He shakes the hand off his shoulder. “Don’t you dare. Stop… stop making everything about you, Jon.” He’s not going to cry. He’s not. “You didn’t have to… to shove the dagger in. Twice. You didn’t have to… hold on, while the blood covered your hands and the life dripped out and the damn tape came up and… and… I had to hold on so hard to keep hold of you the whole time, it… it dragged me to that damn hole in reality and through the hole, and… and you think… you think…”

He can’t help it; tears spill from his eyes, and he begins to shake with rage. How can Jon think…? “Where would I go, Jon?! What, you think I just want to be here in some fairytale land and leave you behind? And for what?! I could’ve killed you and fled and joined the others, you know. I could’ve gone on without you, like Basira did with Daisy. I held on!” He holds out his hands. “These ought to be cut and burned from the tapes trying to… to wrap you up and take you away from me, and it hurt so much, and… and you think… I’m going to… to leave you, after all that?!” His voice has been slowly raising; he’s all but shouting now.

Jon takes a step back. “I--I didn’t…” They sigh. “Martin. I didn’t know. I thought… I just thought that it brought us both. But I didn’t want you to feel… you know, obligated.” Their expression is oddly muted, but even with that sorrow slips through. “You’re right. You had to kill me. And… for that I’m sorry. Really, Martin. I am. If you believe anything, believe me when I apologize for that.”

Martin has needed to hear that, the apology--or he thought he did--but for some reason it just upset him more. He’s shouting now, he can’t help it. “I am not…! Obligated?! Are you… trying to get rid of me? Would you just stop… stop being so… I love you, okay?!” How can Jon not know that by now? “I don’t care if you’re… evil or a warlock or… whatever, I love you, and I’m not leaving you, and if you don’t stop trying to push me away I’ll… I’ll…”

He starts casting about for a proper threat. Stop making tea for a week, hold Jon down and tickle them breathless, pick them up and carry them somewhere they can both get food and have a long cuddle. Ridiculous things, and it almost makes him want to laugh. He’s only mad at Jon because Jon’s blaming themself for things that aren’t their fault.

That’s when he figures out the real problem. Martin doesn’t feel like Jon betrayed him at all. He feels like he betrayed Jon, and he’s the one that needs to apologize. Orpheus doubted and he needs to tell Eurydice he doesn’t blame them for fading back into the Underworld.

Before he can form the words, there’s a shout from the other end of the alley. “Hey! You there! Are you threatening this…”

Martin looks over to see a pair of men dressed in what is likely the uniform of the city guard. The one shouting trails off on seeing Jon. They’re an elf, after all, but… an odd-looking one.

He spins and puts his hands up on seeing the guardsmen; he’s gotten very jumpy around anything resembling the police of late. “What?! No, we’re just… we’re just having a bit of a… lover’s quarrel, is all…”

Jon turns to look at the guards as well. “Threatening me? No. Martin is not…” They stop and glance at Martin for a moment, blinking. They both seem to have realized, at the same time, that they’re not speaking English, but whatever language they are speaking they know fluently.

“Come out of there,” one of the guards says. “Out into the sunlight.”

Martin suddenly understands the way they’re eyeing Jon. Oddly-colored elf, standing in a shadowed alley… the only sort of “dark” elf these men know would be drow, and most drow are considered evil. But Jon is not evil, whatever sort of accusations Martin’s been throwing around.

“Wait, no, they’re not… they’re not a drow, it’s… look, I can explain this...” He takes a step toward the guards

Jon frowns at the word ‘drow’ and then lets out a hiss of warning and reaches for Martin’s arm. “Martin. Don’t…” They’re clearly on edge.

The guards react as they move, the nearer one reaching out to grab Martin and dragging him roughly out into the street. For his part Martin merely yelps and allows himself to be dragged; he’s not really in “adventurer” mindset yet.

Jon, however, evidently is, because they remove the spear from their back and brandish it like they have any idea how to use the thing. “Let him go,” they say in a menacing tone.

The other guard draws his sword and faces Jon while the one who has a grip on Martin reaches for a pair of shackles.

So much for their quest; they’ll have to break out of a Neverwinter jail, first.

“You there! What are you doing to my friend!” The voice is familiar, painfully so. Deeper than Martin’s but higher than Jon’s, but instead of the light tone they’d been used to, there’s an odd cadence--this person clearly expects to be listened to and obeyed even by strangers, which is more than can be said of the person Martin was used to hearing speak in that voice.

It’s not Tim. It can’t be Tim. Tim’s dead.

The guards stop and turn to regard the speaker, both wearing a look of confusion. “These… these men are your… friends, Lord Silverhand?” Martin knows that name, but he’s so shocked by Tim’s voice that it’s escaping him.

The one holding Martin lets go of him and puts the manacles back on his belt. The other looks between Jon and Martin, seeming absolutely baffled. Jon has lowered the spear and is trying to peer past Martin and the guard to get a look at the man.

Martin finally turns to look and… and, impossibly, it does appear to be Tim. A couple of inches shorter, maybe, but then so are Martin and Jon. His ears are slightly pointed, like Martin’s, his hair is platinum blonde and worn long, caught back in a tail at the nape of the neck. He has some bluish tint to the skin around his ears and chin; it occurs to Martin that this man is probably half-moon elf where he’s half-sun elf.

Still, it’s… it’s Tim. Filtered through a half-elven version of House Targaryen, maybe, but Tim nonetheless.

He’s dressed in fine clothing, all blues and silvers, beneath silver-tooled leather armor, with a longbow strapped to his back and a quiver of arrows at his hip. There’s a tabard over that bearing what Martin recognizes as the arms of Luruar and the Silverhands. That’s where he knows the name--Alustriel Silverhand was a famous human wizard who ruled the city-state of Silverymoon for years. Silverymoon is a place of beauty and culture, the “Gem of the North,” and if this man is somehow related to Alustriel then he’d be known in Neverwinter.

That, or Tim also got a fake identity and he’s just playing it up to get along, like Martin’s been planning to.

“I said they were, didn’t I?” the man--Tim? Not Tim?--says. “Look closer at his pack, maybe, hmm?”

Martin’s brain catches up with his eyes and it occurs to him to play into the ruse. “Lord Silverhand! There you are, we’ve been looking all over for you.” Whatever’s going on, they can figure it out once they’re away from the guards.

Jon’s lowered their spear entirely and put it on their back. They approach the entry to the alley and the sun falls over their form; they don’t flinch from the light, but their wholly-black eyes glitter in the sun. “I… Lord Silverhand! We lost you in the crowd…” Thank God Jon has figured out to play along too.

The guards exchange another look of confusion and then the one who’d been holding Martin spots the Harper pin on Martin’s pack. “A Harper. Oh… I’m so sorry, good sir. We thought that… well…” He looks embarrassed. “The alleys aren’t the safest of places, but… you probably already know that.” He chuckles; his cheeks are flaming with embarrassment.

His companion is staring at Jon. “You’re… no drow.” He seems flabbergasted. “But you also aren’t like any elf I’ve seen before… what…” He glances at “Lord Silverhand” and stops himself. “Sorry that we mistook you for…” He closes his mouth again before he finishes the sentence and steps away, sheathing his sword with a practiced motion.

“He is shadar-kai,” Maybe-Tim says without missing a beat. “A servant of the Raven Queen, who is helping my mother with my business.” He smiles brightly, and it’s such a Tim smile it makes Martin’s heart ache. “No harm done, you’re just doing your duty and all. Thank you for your service.”

Maybe-Tim goes to put one arm around Martin’s shoulders and the other around Jon’s, pulling them both away from the guards. He starts to steer them away and down the street. “C’mon, lads,” he says. “Let’s get back to the Mask.”

Martin catches a glimpse of the guards looking at each other again, one of them mouthing ‘shadar-kai’ to the other. Then they shrug and head off in the opposite direction.

Jon glances over at Martin and then at Maybe-Tim. After a few steps they say in a tone that Martin knows is Jon trying to be polite but actually holding in a thousand questions, “I… thank you, Lord Silverhand. Had you not come along when you did, well… things might have gone poorly.”

“I’ll say,” Maybe-Tim replies. “Sneaking about in alleys isn’t the best look, generally, but all’s well that ends well, eh?” He glances behind them to be sure the guards are gone, then lets his arms down. “Now, then, seriously, let me buy you a drink so you can explain just what a Harper and a shadar-kai are doing lurking in an alley in Neverwinter.” He grins. “This has got to be a good story.”

Martin’s heart sinks. He looks like Tim. He sounds like Tim. He acts like Tim! The universe cannot be so cruel as to give them this doppelganger of their dead friend and have it not turn out to really be Tim.

Suddenly he bursts out, “...But don’t you i us?!”

Jon’s face blanches. “Martin... he’s not…” Jon clearly doesn’t think this is really Tim.

The man who looks like Tim blinks at the two of them. “...Should I recognize you? I’m… sorry, if…”

Martin decides to ignore Jon and their skepticism. “Tim,” he says, desperate, “Tim, it’s us… don’t you… it’s Martin, and Jon, we thought you were dead…” He doesn’t know how Tim is here, but he refuses to believe this is coincidence.

The man frowns at him in response.

Jon sighs. “Martin… it’s not Tim…” They look at the man with an apologetic expression. “I’m sorry. You look quite similar to a friend of ours that we lost some time ago… my companion hasn’t quite realized that you can’t be him. Coincidence.” They shoot Martin a look; clearly they think he is mistaken.

“No, Jon, it…” Martin steps away and starts gesturing. “Think about it. You were dead. I was… not dead, but I got dragged with you through that hole in reality. And then who’s the first person we run into, once we get here?” He gestures at the third man. “He sounds like Tim. He looks like Tim. He acts like Tim!”

“...My name is Tim,” the half-elf puts in. “Timotheo, to be precise.” His expression, which had been angry, has become thoughtful. “I really do think I need the whole story. Come along.”

And then the man confirmed to at least be named Tim turns and starts walking away, clearly expecting the two of them to just… follow.

Jon looks after Tim and then at Martin, frowning. “Should we trust him?” Their tone is skeptical.

“What… what does that even mean?” Martin throws his hands in the air. “You really do just want everything to be miserable, don’t you! Well, fine, if you want to be miserable you can just skulk here--”

Jon steps up and presses their mouth to Martin’s, and oh, Martin needed that, needed Jon to initiate. They linger there for a moment and Martin would be just fine staying there but then Jon’s stepping back.

“I don’t want everything to be miserable,” Jon says in a soft tone. “I just… I can’t lose him again. If it’s not Tim…” They trail off and there are the beginnings of tears in those huge dark eyes.

“Oh, Jon,” Martin whispers, and at least for now all of his irritation fades away. He can’t help it; he returns the kiss rather fervently, ignoring everyone around them. Only Jon matters, right now. How could he have been so mad at them? How could he have piled more pain onto them, when they’ve shouldered so much already?

He finally pulls back after a minute or two, takes Jon’s shoulders, and looks them right in those eyes that are all black, and he swears if he looks deep enough he’ll see the whole night sky in the depth of Jon’s eyes. Oh, yes, there’s going to be more poetry about Jon’s eyes.

Martin musters his most reassuring tone. “I have a feeling, okay? And maybe I’m wrong, but even if I am, we’re in a land of magic now, these things, they… happen for a reason, okay?” He smiles, hoping to reinforce the comforting expression. “Even if it’s not him, well, what’s wrong with making new friends, huh? Some guy who just happens to look like our friend walks by, recognizes my Harper pin, knows you’re shadar-kai, and decides to help us? C’mon, Jon, that’s not a coincidence. That’s your Queen putting us in precisely the right place at the right time. Okay?”

Jon leans in for a brief hug, sniffling; they don’t actually cry, but they do seem to take comfort in Martin’s arms. Then they pull back and nod. “Alright. Alright. I will trust your instinct here. You know this place better than I do, so… right. Not coincidence. Providence. That sounds like the right sort of thing for this world.” They nod again, then turn to look around the street, and a pinkish glow creeps into the dusty grey of their skin.

Martin looks around, and then he, too, starts to blush. People are staring at them, more than one muttering oaths about “damn Sunites.” As for Tim, he’s standing a little ways away, with a tolerantly amused look, as if he’s aware they were having a moment and was giving them some space.

When Tim notices them looking at him, he grins. “Sorry to interrupt, lads, but that sort of thing might be better for the Mask.” He winks.

Martin grabs Jon’s hand firmly and walks over toward Tim. “Sorry. Just… sorry. Bit of a… uhh… yeah, let’s get that drink and we can talk, okay?”

Tim just nods, still grinning, then turns to lead the two of them down the street.

#the magnus archives #tma #jon sims #jonathan sims #jon the archivist #martin blackwood #tim stoker #jonmartin #jmart #otp: one way or another together #tma d&d au #let all the broken pieces shine #tma spoilers #tim tim tim tim #i've been so excited for this omg

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

Text

Retribution Fails

by Dan H

Saturday, 26 June 2010

Dan did not like Retribution Falls~

A little personal history: the original title and subtitle for this article were “Still Up In the Air – Dan Hemmens is ambivalent about Retribution Falls.”

Then over the course of writing this article, I came to realise that while I really enjoyed reading the book (I finished it in two sittings over two days), in retrospect I found large parts of it cheap and annoying, and found myself increasingly unable to defend its hideous gender-fail. I also found out that this thing had been shortlisted for the Arthur C. Clarke award which made me frankly despair, because if this is the best SF has to offer then the genre really is fucked.

So yes, this started out more balanced than it ended up. Short version: the book is quite fun, extremely faily, and not all that well written. Judged as a low-investment romp, it’s alright. Judged as a nominee for a prestigious award, it needs to be killed with fire.

Oh, and spoilers, for those that care.

Anyway, Chris Wooding's Retribution Falls is generally billed as a “steampunk western” although as recent discussions here at FB show, neither term is really well enough defined for this label to have much meaning. Speaking personally, I didn't get much of a western vibe from it, but that's possibly because Kyra and I have been neck deep in Deadwood and therefore I have trouble getting the real “Western” feel from something where people aren't yelling “cocksucker” every two minutes. Or it could be the fact that since it's primarily set onboard a ship, and concerns itself almost exclusively with pirates, it fits more into “pirate” than “cowboy” in my personal cataloguing system. Although actually this is all so much pettifogging since the whole distinction between “fantasy,” “steampunk,” “western,” and “pirate yarn,” can be neatly avoided by treating the whole thing as part of that (now obsolete) genre the “adventure story”.

So yes, Retribution Falls is an adventure story. It concerns the crew of the airship Ketty Jay as they develop from a ragtag group of ne'er do wells into a properly formed and fully functioning crew.

The crew (who are all neatly introduced by means of in-character introductions to one of the viewpoint characters in chapter two) are as follows: Darien Frey, hot lothario captain; Pin, stupid pilot; Harkins, cowardly pilot; Silo, silent technician and obligatory brown person; Malvery, the drunken doctor; Crake, the tormented daemonist and Jez, the new navigator who is also, for what it's worth, the only woman on board. I'm pretty sure I've remembered everybody, and if I've forgotten anyone they're probably highly forgettable.

I'm going to come back to gender issues in a bit, but I'm going to start by pointing out that having one female character out of seven is the worst possible option. Zero out of seven, and you have a setting in which women don't fly airships, which is absolutely fine. Put in exactly one, and you suddenly have a society where women are apparently perfectly accepted on the setting equivalent of the Spanish Main, but never the less you've only got one in your crew. Zero is a better number than one in this situation is all I'm saying.

But like I say, I'll come back to this later.

Anyway, the crew are hired to board another aircraft and steal a cask of gems, for which they will be paid fifty thousand ducats. This too-good-to-be-true job offer turns out (surprise surprise) to be too good to be true. Which results in the crew blowing up an airliner and having to go on the run from both the legitimate military (the “Coalition”) and a variety of scoundrels and bounty hunters that want to hand them over to various interested parties.

So far, so swashbuckling, and it is indeed about sixty percent rollicking good fun. Unfortunately it's then twenty percent tedious exposition, ten percent sloppy writing, ten percent sexism.

Anyway, where to begin:

You Can't Take the Sky From Me

A lot of comparisons have been made between Firefly and Retribution Falls, and this might be a good time to say that much as I find Whedon annoying, and as much pleasure as I take in questioning the man's uber-feminist image it's worth admitting that he does about a million times better than a lot of other writers out there. Sure, Mal Reynolds may have a rampaging case of nice-guy syndrome, and might treat Inara like dirt, but by comparison to Wooding, Whedon deserves every Equality award he's ever got. Which is good, since he's clearly going to keep on getting them.

But I digress.

Superficially, Retribution Falls is a lot like Firefly. It's even got an on-the-run aristocrat with a girl in a box. Structurally, however, it's a lot more like Lost or Heroes.

I'm going to digress again. One of my favourite things about Heroes is the fact that I once read an interview with Tim Kring, in which he admitted that he neither knew nor cared about the history of the superhero genre, and that his main inspiration for Heroes was the way in which Lost (and here I confess to paraphrasing) cynically manipulated its audience by doling out tiny pieces of information about members of its large ensemble cast over the course of the series. He just thought that this was a fantastic structure for a TV show.

Retribution Falls works very much the same way. The first three or four chapters are taken up with fast-paced introductions to the cast, which more or less go like this:

“Hello, I see that bullet wound you had healed mysteriously fast”

“Yes, it is, mysterious isn't it?”

“I know, I noticed it because of something that happened in my past”

“Your past? Gosh, might there be something mysterious about it?”

“Why yes, you'll find that most members of the crew have something mysterious about them.”

“Wait, we've just heard news that we're being followed by the dread pirate Trinica Dracken!”

“The dread pirate Trinica Dracken you say! Gosh, mysteriously I think the captain may have some kind of connection to her, in his past. His mysterious past.”

“Gosh how mysterious!”

It's not quite that bad. But it's almost that bad. Although it's not necessarily that bad that it's that bad, because this really does make the whole thing quite readable. Yes it's shoddy and manipulative, but the thing about shoddy, manipulative tricks is that they work. Show me a character with a mysterious past, and I'll be unable to put the book down until I've either found out what that mysterious past is, or convinced myself that I'm never going to. Therefore if you give me seven characters, each with their own mysterious past, and give me the background on one every four chapters then you can pretty much guarantee that I'll be reading until one in the morning.

Of course the downside of this kind of strategy is that in-the-moment readability comes at the cost of after-the-fact satisfaction. Few and far between are the occasions on which I've discovered a character's secret backstory and not found it some combination of trite, predictable, and implausible. It's like popcorn, utterly compelling but at the end all you're left with is a faint cardboardy aftertaste.

Structure and Story Issues

The book is certainly readable, and mostly fun, but there are times when it bogs down in tedious exposition. This would be bad enough if it was just your classic “as you know, your father, the King...” dialogue, although there is an awful lot of it – people in this world seem to spend an inordinate amount of time having conversations in which they explain the basic causes and consequences of wars that happened a couple of years ago, the equivalent of people in the real world saying “of course after the Al-Quaeda bombings in 2001, the American government launched a series of military actions throughout the Middle East, beginning by attacking the Taliban who at that time were in control of Afghanistan...” over their morning coffee. Unfortunately, as

other reviewers

have pointed out, the same principle is applied to little things like character development.

The key offener here is Darien Frey himself, the vagabond captain of a vagabond crew, guiding his motley band of reprobates to high adventure on the open skies. The emotional thrust of the book, such as it is, involves Frey learning to take responsibility for his role as captain, and to learn respect and affection for his crew (and perhaps for other people in his life as well).

The problem with this is that our only insight into Frey's emotional state is what the book tells us Frey's emotional state is. We are told early on that he does not value his crew, and that he considers himself a bit of a loser. We are told later that he does value his crew, and that he's pretty much okay with himself, and has accepted the responsibilities that come with his position as captain. The problem is that – with the exception of a couple of clearly signposted set-pieces - we see no appreciable change in his behaviour, or even his attitude. The man who leads his crew the a doomed attempt to plunder the Ace of Skulls at the start of the book is not discernibly different from the one who spearheads the attack on Retribution Falls at the end. Both ultimately involve Frey risking his ship and his crew, without their knowledge or consent, in pursuit of a large reward which he has little reason to expect receiving. The fact that the first attack is doomed and the second succeeds has everything to do with narrative structure and nothing to do with Fray's leadership choices.

To put it another way, Frey spends the first half of the book chiding himself for his selfishness, indolence, and pisspoor leadership skills. By the end of the book he has stopped chiding himself for all of these things, but has failed to show any actual change in his behaviour. Which creates the impression that all of his growth and development over the course of the book has served only to make him less self-aware.

member of the twitterati

sums this up all very succinctly as “The Heavy Handed Adventures of Captain Uttercock”.

In many ways, the book reminded me of

The Last Five Years

. I spent so much of the book going “this guy is a cock, am I supposed to think this guy is a cock, I must be supposed to think this guy is a cock, but nobody else seems to think this guy as a cock except his psycho bitch exes, but this guy is clearly a cock...” that it wound up being remarkably intrusive. I had no problem with the other unsympathetic characters (Grayther Crake the daemonist, for example, is clearly a judgmental asshole, but he's obviously supposed to be a judgmental asshole so I understand how I'm supposed to react to him) but with Frey I always felt like my perception of his flaws was always slightly to one side of the author's perception.

For example, the book opens with Fray and Crake captured by a gang lord (here Wooding gains points for starting with some action, and loses them immediately for having the action be completely unrelated to the rest of the story). The Gang Lord threatens to kill Crake unless Fray gives him the ignition codes to the Ketty Jay. Fray of course refuses, and Crake has a massive chip on his shoulder about this throughout the whole book. Then later in the book, Trinica Dracken (evil pirate bitch-queen – incidentally I'm using the word “bitch” a lot in this review, for reasons that should become clear later) captures them again, and makes the same threat, and this time Fray gives her the codes, thus causing a big sign to appear saying THIS IS CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT.

That particular element would have been more effective but for two things. Firstly, it was so telegraphed it lost all its impact – Crake spent the entire freaking book saying “hey Frey if that EVER HAPPENS AGAIN you'd better give over the damned codes, m'kay.” Secondly, refusing to give up the codes was absolutely the right decision.

Consider. You are being held captive by a psychotic bastard who is only keeping you alive because you have information they want. Your only chance of survival is to not give them the damned information. If you do give them the information, chances are they'll kill all of you anyway. In this situation, giving up the codes is certainly understandable, but it's also completely stupid.

This was broadly the interpretation I was assuming the Doctor was driving at when, after Crake complained that the captain almost let him get killed, the Doctor insisted that no, Frey was a good man who would never let his crew down. I thought, in fact, that they were going for a kind of Mal Reynolds effect – making the captain good but not nice, the kind of man who would always do the right thing, even if that meant letting somebody die for the good of the ship.

Turns out this wasn't what they meant at all. Clearly, giving up the codes to the psychotic maniac was supposed to be the right decision, which is why it's CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT when Frey does it later, so when the Doctor says he's a good man he just kind of means – I'm not sure. That he might be a selfish, whiney, borderline amoral dickhead but at least he wasn't actively malicious?

The only reading I can really support for Frey's character development over the book – as in the only reading which I think the author and the text expect you to take away from it – is that Frey is a good man deep down, but lacks the confidence to act on that goodness. He is, I think, supposed to be afraid of getting too close to people and it is that fear which we are supposed to see as his great weakness, not the fact that he chooses to act on that fear by treating people really unacceptably badly. To draw yet another comparison which will require me to link my own articles, it's rather like Tanis Blacksword in

Banewreaker

- Tanis as you might recall murdered his wife in a jealous rage, and perhaps I'm being a prude, but to my mind the key problem here is not the fact that he flew into a jealous rage, but the fact that while he was in it he murdered his freaking wife.

Wooding seems to be under the impression that Darien Frey is a good man who sometimes allows his insecurities to get the better of him, and seems to see the book as chronicling his battle to overcome those insecurities. I read Darien Frey as a gigantic asshole, who sometimes uses his perfectly forgivable insecurities as an excuse to treat people like shit.

Women

Probably the most illustrative example of this dissonance in Frey’s personality is in his reaction to his ex-fiancée, Trinica Dracken.

We are first introduced to Trinica as a terrifying pirate, a ruthless, ass-kicking queen of the skies. We learn fairly early on that she has some kind of connection to Frey, and I initially had high expectations for their reunion. To fully explain the reasons behind this, I’m going to have to go into some detail about Frey’s behaviour up to this point, so bear with me.

Throughout the book it has been clear that Frey has a history of treating his romantic partners like dirt. It is clear also that part of the reason he treats his romantic partners like dirt is that gorgeous women constantly throw themselves at him. Not only throw themselves at him, but throw themselves at him and actually fall in love with him, and then stifle him with their smothering girlness.

For example, when Jez – the new navigator – shows up in chapter two, Frey observes that he’s glad she isn’t too attractive, because if she was he’d “be obliged to sleep with her.”

How exactly is the causality supposed to work on this one? Does he mean that if she was more attractive he would want to sleep with her, in which case it wouldn’t be an obligation really, would it? Or does he mean that if she was more attractive she would want to sleep with him? In which case what, does he think that unattractive women don’t have libidos? (I suspect the answer to that last question is probably “yes” actually). At the time I took the most charitable reading, which is that this is evidence of Frey being a self-deluding cock who isn’t capable of owning his sexuality, and that over the course of the book he would come to realise this.

Then about halfway through the book, he has to infiltrate an Awakener (think Catholicism meets Scientology) stronghold in order to find one of his many former conquests and – if you’ll pardon the phrase – pump her for information. It’s a single sex institution and he spends most of the time while he’s infiltrating the building fantasising about all the nubile, sex-starved young women he’ll find in here. I’ll say here that I actually found his fantasising perfectly reasonable, because again I read it as evidence that Frey is a bit of a prick, and was quite pleased when it became clear that his infiltration wasn’t going to end in spankings and baby-oil.

Then he meets his ex (whose name I shall look up when I get home), who kicks him in the head (because she r strong wimminz!) and has a go at him for leaving her in a nunnery for two years, despite having promised that they’d always be together. Frey then has this long, self-justifying internal monologue about how you had to lie to women because if you didn’t they’d only go and find somebody who did lie to them (because you see women want a man who says he’ll be with them forever, and men just want sex, and there is no overlap whatsoever – no men are interested in commitment, no women are interested in straight-up fucking) and that it therefore wasn’t his fault. Then of course he lies to her again, they have sex and she tells him everything he wants to know, and he promises to come back for her which he of course has no intention of doing. But you have to lie to women, so that’s okay.

So anyway, by the time Trinica Dracken shows up on the screen Frey’s pick-up-artist bullshit is wearing pretty thin. Up to this point, however, I was honestly expecting Trinica Dracken to turn the whole thing on its head. I was expecting this to be the one relationship in his whole sorry past that had actually been a partnership of equals, a woman who instead of clinging to him with doe-eyed devotion had been strong and confident in her own right, whose relationship with Frey had been tempestuous and remarkable. I expected the love of Frey’s life to be a woman who had a ship of her own, a crew of her own and a life of her own. It wouldn’t have justified his acting like a dickhead ever since, but it would at least have explained it. I know that this strays into the realms of

counter-factual criticism

but my intent here isn't to say “Trinica Dracken should have been different” but rather “I had a number of false impressions about what Trinica Dracken would be like, that led me to read all the sexist bullshit in the book more favourably than I might have otherwise.”

Here, for what it is worth, is a summary of what Frey's relationship with Trinica Dracken is revealed to have been like:

Trinica Dracken was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist for whom Frey worked. When they were both in their late teens, they fell in love. Trinica was a lovely sweet girl with long hair who wore white dresses, Frey was much as he is now. Eventually, the relationship had gone wrong. Here is Frey's description of it:

In the early months he'd believed they'd be together forever. He told himself he'd found a woman for the rest of his life. He couldn't conceive of meeting someone more wonderful than she was, and he wasn't tempted to try. But it was one thing to daydream such notions, and quite another to be faced with putting them into practice. When she began to talk of engagement, with a straightforwardness he'd previously found charming, he began to idolize her a little less. His patience became less. No longer could he endlessly indulge her flights of fancy. His smile became fixed as she played her girlish games with him. Her jokes all seemed to go on too long. He found himself wishing she'd just be sensible

Okay, leaving aside for the moment that Frey's analysis of what went wrong with his relationship boils down to “the bitch wouldn't keep her mouth shut” note that here his dissatisfaction with Trinica stems simultaneously from (a) the fact that he starts to see that she isn't the perfect fantasy figure he thought she was (he “idolizes her less” which in sane-person world is a good thing in a relationship) and (b) the fact that she still displays many qualities of the fantasy figure he wants her to be (her “girlish games” and her “flights of fancy”). You've got to feel sorry for the girl, because I seriously don't know how she was supposed to please this arrant cocksucker.

It gets worse. Obviously Frey takes the sensible and mature attitude to being in a relationship with somebody for whom you feel manifest contempt, which is to agree to marry her, get her pregnant, and leave her at the altar. He does, of course, admit that this was sub optimal. Here is his magnanimous and painful admission of culpability, which represents a significant moment in his growth and maturation:

His love for her had been the most precious thing in his life, and she'd ruined it with her insecurities, her need to tie him down. She'd made him cowardly. In his heart he knew that, but he could never say it.

This? Seriously Chris Wooding? This is Frey's big moment of self-realization? That he was wrong to let her make him stop loving her? Not, say, wrong to be an emotionally abusive asshole? Or that he was wrong to abandon his pregnant girlfriend on their wedding day? Oh no, his great fault, his great flaw, is that she made him cowardly?

A fairer man might point out at this stage that Trinica does at least call him on this, the fact that he's always blaming his problems on everybody else. The problem is he doesn't stop doing it, but the book treats him like he has.

Anyway, Frey abandons Trinica, leaving her pregnant in a world where, it is strongly implied, a woman who has a child outside wedlock is basically ruined. This results in Trinica attempting suicide, which results in her having a miscarriage. Which results in Frey spending the next ten years hating her for murdering their child.

Of course here again, Frey has a Big Character Development moment, when he realizes that while he is totally justified in hating Trinica, because she totally did murder their child, he has to accept that he is also partly responsible for her murdering their child, because he allowed her to make him cowardly, so that when she attempted suicide (which, let us be clear, was also cowardly) he didn't get back in time to save the day.

To put it another way, Darien Frey's character arc ends with him confronting a woman who he emotionally abused to the point at which she tried to kill herself, and forgiving her for it.

Up until his reunion with Trinica, Frey comes across as a feckless, self-absorbed cock. His interactions with his former love, far from making him more sympathetic, instead reveal him to be a judgemental asshole. He accuses her of murdering their child – an accusation neither Trinica nor the text challenges. He calls her a coward for attempting suicide – an accusation which the text treats as factual. And of course he has a great deal to say about her appearance:

Her skin was powdered ghost-white. Her hair – so blonde it was almost albino – was cut short, sticking up in uneven tufts as if it had been butchered with a knife. Her lips were a red deep enough to be vulgar

Ironically, of course, this actually makes her sound totally awesome (although where the fuck does he get off judging her choice of lipstick – I'm sorry Darien, is your ex not looking virginal enough for you? Well fuck you you misogynistic shit). But just in case we don't get that her new badass look is bad m'kay we get the following exchange during their next meeting:

”How'd you get this way Trinica?” he said. He raised his head and gestured at her across the gloomy study. “The hair, the skin...” he hesitated. “You used to be beautiful.” “I'm done with beautiful,” she replied

Because of course after she attempted suicide (sorry, I mean “murdered her unborn child” - her life is not, after all, important here) she tried to run away on an airship, but she was captured by pirates who gang raped her. And of course she responded to that by making herself UGLY. Because it is made very clear in the text that She Was Raped Because She Was Beautiful. Incidentally, despite being “through with beautiful” she still wears lipstick, and apparently a particularly vulgar shade of it, if Frey is any judge. I can't be sure, but I'd have thought if you were going down the “I shall make myself ugly so people won't rape me” route you'd avoid lipstick entirely. Then again, maybe Wooding knows something I don't.

And of course Frey's reaction to the whole thing is:

He didn't pity her. He couldn't. He only mourned the loss of the young woman he'd known ten years ago. This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence.

So ... your ex girlfriend, the former love of your life shows up, and tells you that she's spent the better part of the last ten years getting beaten and raped by a series of pirate crews until she'd eventually clawed her way into a position where she finally had a modicum of security, and all you care about is the fact that she's no longer the innocent little girl you fell in love with? The innocent little girl who you fell in love with but also treated like shit, wanted to get rid of, impregnated and abandoned? You can't spare one second to think about anything except how her present situation reflects on you.

Die in a fire you smug, self-centred little fuckstain.

Umm, there's a fair amount more fail in the book, but I'm really not sure I can go on. Suffice to say that the only other female characters in the book of any significance are Jez the navigator, whose contribution to the climactic confrontation is to whore herself out to a mid-ranking Naval officer (and she doesn't even get to do it on page) and Bess, the golem that Crake created out of his eight year old niece, who he stabbed to death while possessed by a daemon. Crake occasionally angsts about allowing the crew to use Bess (who it is strongly implied can feel pain) as portable cover in firefights. This does not stop him from doing it repeatedly.

Fantasy Rape Watch

Number of Named Female Characters: 4

Of Whom Protagonist's ex Lovers: 2

Of Whom Dead: 2

Of Whom Rape Victims: 1

Of Whom Murdered By Viewpoint Character: 1

Causes of Rape and Sexual Abuse, by Attribution in Text

Nature of Violent Culture: 0%

Nature of Patriarchal Society: 0%

Decisions Made Freely by Rapists: 0%

Beauty of Victim: 100%

Consequences of Rape and Sexual Abuse, by Importance as Judged by Text

Emotional Distress to Victim: 0%

Physical Injury to Victim: 0%

Emotional Distress to Victim's Ex-Boyfriend: 25%

Victim No Longer Physically Desirable to Ex-Boyfriend: 75%

Who Suffers as a Result of a Woman's Suicide Attempt, by Attribution in Text

Her: 0%

Her Unborn Child: 70%

Her Boyfriend: 30%

Who Suffers as the Result of the Murder of an Eight Year Old Girl, as Judged by Text

The Eight Year Old Girl: 20%

The Murderer: 80%

Ways In Which An Intelligent, Talented Woman, Who Has Superhuman Strength And Is Nearly Invulnerable to Physical Damage Could Attempt To Rescue Her Companions At Short Notice

Steal a Ship and Mount a Rescue: 0%

Sneak into Execution and Mount a Rescue: 0%

Prostitute Herself: 100%

My Level of Surprise That This Book Was Nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award:

30%

My Hope For the Genre, Taking This Book As a Standard:

0%Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Minority Warrior

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http://alex-von-cercek.livejournal.com/

at 20:16 on 2010-06-26Holy shit.

I don't even have anything else to say. Just...holy shit.

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http://furare.livejournal.com/

at 20:48 on 2010-06-26Wow. That just *is* a world of fail, isn't it?

Focusing just on the "you murdered our child" bit for a minute, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of

something I read recently

about men who want to make abortion all about them, a terrible tragedy foisted on them by the actions of an evil woman. I know a suicide-induced miscarriage isn't exactly abortion, but I think Frey's reaction comes quite close to theirs. Made me wonder if it was possibly intentional - the parallel seems quite obvious to me.

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Arthur B

at 22:49 on 2010-06-26

Focusing just on the "you murdered our child" bit for a minute, it's uncomfortably reminiscent of something I read recently about men who want to make abortion all about them, a terrible tragedy foisted on them by the actions of an evil woman. I know a suicide-induced miscarriage isn't exactly abortion, but I think Frey's reaction comes quite close to theirs. Made me wonder if it was possibly intentional - the parallel seems quite obvious to me.

It's an analogy that jumped out at me too. At the very least, if performing an act that leads to a miscarriage is regarded by Frey as murder, then abortion has to come under that category for Frey's views (and the text's views, it seems) to be even slightly internally consistent. And "men's rights" morons do seem to like portraying abortion as a crime against fathers, and to blame women for everything that men do wrong in a relationship.

Out of interest, how do books get nominated for the Clarke award?

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Dan H

at 23:11 on 2010-06-26

I know a suicide-induced miscarriage isn't exactly abortion, but I think Frey's reaction comes quite close to theirs. Made me wonder if it was possibly intentional - the parallel seems quite obvious to me.

I think that's fair, there's a rather skeevy implication that she deliberately attempted suicide *in order* to induce a miscarriage *in order* to get at Frey.

Because Women Are Evil.

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http://furare.livejournal.com/

at 12:59 on 2010-06-27Because she couldn't have wanted to kill herself because she couldn't deal with the disgrace *he* left her with? I'm not trying to undermine her autonomy by saying it's his fault she slept with him; however, it's unquestionably his fault that he abandoned her at the altar. So surely, by his own logic, if she had succeeded in committing suicide, he would have murdered her. (Just kidding, I can see that Frey's "logic" serves no purpose other than to make sure that he is not genuinely to blame for anything.)

One slightly off-topic thing I feel the need to say is that I Have Had Enough of anything - books, magazine articles, people - who claim that women all want romance and/or commitment, while men just want sex. A lot of women actually want sex, and some of them are actually willing to admit that they're not looking for candlelit dinners or long-term commitment in exchange. Actually, "in exchange" is the problem, isn't it? It implies that sex is something you have to compensate a woman for if she "gives" it to you.

And seriously. If a guy I was dating told me that he wanted to "be with me forever", I would probably laugh in his face. And then try to scrape him off my leg. I don't mind commitment in and of itself, but that sort of declaration fucking terrifies me. But then, I've come to the conclusion that when pop culture talks about "women" and "what women want", they are almost never talking about me. It's like I don't exist or something.

To bring this comment back to the book under discussion, I think it's a real shame that the author squandered a potentially awesome character by treading tired old ground. I mean, a woman who's a badass airship pirate captain! That has so much potential - a character fantasy-reading women might enjoy and identify with. If she wasn't defined almost entirely by what men had done to her. Kind of typical for the genre, though, isn't it.

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Niall

at 14:38 on 2010-06-27

Out of interest, how do books get nominated for the Clarke award?

The Clarke Award is administered by a body called the Serendip Foundation. Each year, they arrange a panel of five judges: traditionally (that is, for pretty much the whole of the Award's thirty-year existence) two of these have been nominated by the British Science Fiction Association, two by the Science Fiction Foundation, and one by A. N. Other invited body, which at present is SF Crowsnest.com, and has been the Science Museum and various other groups. Around this time of year, the Chair of the judging panel writes to UK publishers inviting them to submit books for consideration. Any science fiction novel published in the UK in the relevant calendar year is eligible; the Award does not define "science fiction" or "novel", that's left up to publishers and to the judges to debate. The judges read all the books. They may ask the Chair to contact publishers and request that other titles are submitted for consideration.

The judges then meet in February (ish) to select a shortlist of six. The shortlist is announced in March or April. The judges re-read the books they shortlisted, and meet in April/May (for the last few years, it's been at the start of the Sci-Fi-London film festival) to select a winner.

Basically, it's the Booker Prize process, although I think that in the case of the Booker the Chair is a full member of the panel, and in the Clarke they're a facilitator, appointed by Serendip to run the judges' meetings but not having a vote themselves. Other differences: publishers aren't limited to submitting only two titles, as they are in the Booker; and judges are typically asked to serve for two consecutive years (not all on the same schedule, so there's some refreshment and some carry-over from year to year).

The other titles shortlisted this year were Yellow Blue Tibia by Adam Roberts, Galileo's Dream by Kim Stanley Robinson, Spirit by Gwyneth Jones, Far North by Marcel Theroux, and the eventual winner, The City & The City be China Mieville.

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Niall

at 14:40 on 2010-06-27Oh, and the judges for this year were Jon Courtenay Grimwood and Chris Hill for the BSFA, Francis Spufford and Rhiannon Lassiter for the SF Foundation, and Paul Skevington for SF Crowsnest.

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http://alex-von-cercek.livejournal.com/

at 16:36 on 2010-06-27

Hell, Trinica sounds like the only interesting character in the book. In fact, the book that would be interesting to read would be titled "Kill Frey" and it would be about Trinica Dracken crossing off names from her Death List.

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Dan H

at 21:10 on 2010-06-27

Actually, "in exchange" is the problem, isn't it? It implies that sex is something you have to compensate a woman for if she "gives" it to you.

I believe this is an attitude which I've heard succinctly summarized as "women have sex, men want sex." And yeah, it's kind of a problem. It creates this notion that sex is something that men are supposed to get out of women by whatever means society deems acceptable, which leads to all sorts of nasty places.

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Melissa G.

at 22:31 on 2010-06-27

I totally forgive you for off-topicness because I am so sick of that attitude too! It's so annoying and gender box-y.

But I have to say that I'm even more sick and tired of this attitude:

Because it is made very clear in the text that She Was Raped Because She Was Beautiful.

Because that is such utter BS and a total misunderstanding of what rape is and why it happens. Rape is about power, not desire or lust or being unable to control oneself because the other person is so beautiful. It's so disgusting and irritating to see rape twisted into something where the guy just can't control himself because she's so damn hot. Come on, who could blame him? And then, that brings you to the "She should be flattered he raped her; he could have any woman he wants" mentality. Just...no.

Apologies for going slightly off-topic myself, but that mentality about rape is a huge rage button of mine. Especially since I recently seem to be reading scripts (for my job) of movies where violence against women seems to be the most used plot point for the male character to do anything.

Women in Refrigerators

, anyone?

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Dan H

at 22:55 on 2010-06-27

And then, that brings you to the "She should be flattered he raped her; he could have any woman he wants" mentality. Just...no.

Which might be an apposite moment to bring up the scene fairly early in the book when the characters are attacking an information-broker's hideout, and the guy's pet whores are holed up with shotguns worried that the band of armed psychos who just burst in might, y'know, rape them.

But fortunately Frey reveals that it is he, the hot man from earlier. So he can't be a rapist, because he is hot!

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Melissa G.

at 23:20 on 2010-06-27

So he can't be a rapist, because he is hot!

::facepalm:: That's right, hot guys can't be rapists, and ugly girls can't be rape victims. I mean, who'd want to rape them? They're ugly. And rape is just about how hot a girl is. Really, it's the ultimate compliment!

Sigh. The fail just hurts sometimes....

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http://alex-von-cercek.livejournal.com/

at 23:22 on 2010-06-27You know, taken 100% and entirely out of context, the interchange of

could actually be a snappy wisecrack on the lines of those typically delivered by pulp heroes or, say, Sam Spade. You know what, I think we should all ignore the context, Trinica is an awesome character without it.

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Dan H

at 23:28 on 2010-06-27

Sigh. The fail just hurts sometimes....

To be very slightly fair, I should add that I'm only presenting one of several possible readings. It's possible that they decide to trust him because they recognize him from earlier, for example, but mixed in with all the faily stuff about beauty it bugged me.

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Melissa G.

at 01:55 on 2010-06-28@Dan

That's true, but there's still a sigh on my part at rape-fail in general because I've heard that kind of mentality and attitude expressed far too many times. Especially in conjunction with celebrities who get accused of rape. >.< So the book may get a pass, but society does not. ::shakes fist angrily at society::

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Wardog

at 09:26 on 2010-06-28I was going to read this ... now I am not.

I am depressed.

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http://furare.livejournal.com/

at 11:06 on 2010-06-28Oh hell, don't get me started on the rapefail. I didn't touch it in previous comments because it kinda makes me too angry to write coherently. Let's just say I've read an awful lot about rape in recent weeks and months, and I am sickened by the attitude Melissa mentions with respect to rapist celebrities. I guess the assumption that a celebrity could "have any woman he wants" is pretty damned insulting, too. Sorry, but I don't sleep with guys who act like they're doing me a favour just by noticing me.

And on the general subject of rape and rapefail - it is really aggravating that blog posts on rape are *always* commented on by someone claiming that the real victims of rape are men who are unfairly accused. Because women love "crying rape" and having their sex lives, choice of clothes and conduct at the time in question, and a million and one other things scrutinised. I would not be surprised if an awful lot of retracted accusations were actually due to the fact that investigation of the crime makes the victim feel like they were at fault.

Regardless, "false" reporting occurs in 2-8% of cases, which is about the same as an awful lot of other crimes. (Rape apologists carry round a 41% false report statistic that was taken from a fatally flawed study done in the 70s, rather than the most recent FBI statistics, because it's the one that makes them look right.) But then, issues that largely affect women - like rape and domestic violence - have to be invaded by men telling us that MEN are the victims here, that rape is a stick evil women use to beat MEN and why are we still talking anyway SHUT UP.

So yeah. Novels - and anything else written by anyone ever - that put the blame for rape on anything the victim did or is, rather than the decision made by the rapist to rape her, are things I have no patience with at all. The fact that rape is seen as the victim's fault in real life makes it really far from okay to say that in a novel. Unless you're trying to make the point that your viewpoint character is a misogynistic shit - but I don't think that was the intended reading here.

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Melissa G.

at 01:14 on 2010-06-29

Oh hell, don't get me started on the rapefail. I didn't touch it in previous comments because it kinda makes me too angry to write coherently.

Ditto for me. It's gotten to the point where every time rape shows up in a book/show/movie/what have you, I tend to roll my eyes and then start to judge harshly. Usually it just seems like the writer thinks "What's the most traumatic thing that could happen to this girl? Oh, I know! She gets raped." Or even worse, "What's the most traumatic thing that could happen to this guy? Oh, I know! His girlfriend/wife/mother/daughter/sister gets raped." It just ends up seeming unoriginal and lazy - not to mention the possibility of epic fail.

I do just want to plug something that I was really impressed with as far as how it handled rape and incorporated it into the story. And surprisingly, it's a comic book! It was Ultimate Elektra - a short mini-series type deal. I actually thought that the rape was handled realistically and was meaningful to the story; it all felt like something that could really happen. I'd love to know if anyone else read it and what you thought of it.

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Arthur B

at 01:49 on 2010-06-29

It's gotten to the point where every time rape shows up in a book/show/movie/what have you, I tend to roll my eyes and then start to judge harshly.

Same here. I started to read

The Heart of Myrial

by Maggie Furey a while back, and at first it was silly but basically harmless fun.

Then there was a bit where some peasant woman gets raped by bailiffs to establish two things: that their employer is a rotter, and that the guardsmen who show up and summarily execute the rapist they catch in the act are basically good people who we should cheer for.

I stopped reading at that point.

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http://ignisophis.livejournal.com/

at 15:03 on 2010-09-14A friend of mine recently recommended this book to me. I read it, really enjoyed it and recommended it to my friends, one of whom pointed me to this review. Which is full of things I disagree with, so I thought I should post to explain why.

Judged as a low-investment romp, it’s alright. Judged as a nominee for a prestigious award, it needs to be killed with fire.

Surely a book should be judged on its merits, or lack thereof? Nominations for the Clarke Award have very little to do with quality, and shouldn't your issues with its shortlisting be a matter for a review of the Clarke Award and/or its judges? After all, I doubt Chris Wooding wrote it specifically with the Clarke Award in mind.

I don't agree that zero female crew would have been better than one - it gave me the impression, not of a setting where "women are apparently perfectly accepted", but of a setting where there is very strong social pressure against women entering that line of work. Given the sexism inherent in the rest of the setting, positive discrimination in the crew's gender ratio would have changed the whole focus of the story.

I had a different reading on all of this. For me, part of the appeal of the book is that almost all of the information we have is told from the point of view of a character who is, not to put too fine a point on it, a horrible self-deluding wreck of a human being, damaged by the consequences of his own actions and continuing to damage both himself and those around him. Considering the timescale of the book, I think any genuine change in his behaviour would be too rushed to be plausible. Instead, we see a change in his internal attitude and intentions which will maybe lead to a future change in his behaviour, and till then he's faking it until he can make it. We've spent the whole book being shown how much he wraps himself in delusional self-justification and I don't think there's ever much of a change in its level, just in its form and motives and likely consequences.

I did find it extremely effective, and honestly didn't know which way Frey would jummp. Firstly, Crake's earlier harping on about it did telegraph that a similar situation would probably happen again but could have just been to add weight and consequence should Frey have handled it the same way. Secondly, to my mind it was the right decision not to give the codes the first time, but the right decision to

give

the codes the second time - Macarde just wanted the information, the ship and a bit of revenge, whereas Dracken primarily wanted Frey and the crew and had a good reason to kill Crake; to her the information and the ship were just a bonus. Which is why I didn't think we were meant to think that giving up the codes the first time would've been the right decision.

This is a reading I completely disagree with. If this is the case then why, on the third-to-last page (after Frey has done some heroic things and finally started to bond with his crew), does the author feel the need to remind us of all the horrible things Frey has done? The impression I get from the text is that Frey is a horribly flawed man, but that even horribly flawed people can have some redeeming features, can occasionally do good things despite themselves, and can strive to be better.

I'm always reluctant to claim knowledge of an author's mind, but here in particular I think you're doing Wooding a great disservice. Particularly as Wooding never tells us what he thinks, only what Frey thinks.

because you see women want a man who says he’ll be with them forever, and men just want sex, and there is no overlap whatsoever – no men are interested in commitment, no women are interested in straight-up fucking

For me this was one of the cues that Frey's thought processes are not an authorial voice. He may think about it that way, but the one sex scene in the book has the woman taking the initiative and displaying a greater sexual appetite.

Causes of Rape and Sexual Abuse, by Attribution in Text Beauty of Victim: 100%

According to testimony of said victim, possibly in order to give herself security by thinking that she's safe from rape now that she is attempting to present herself as being far from beautiful. Attributed by a character within the text rather than the text itself.

Consequences of Rape and Sexual Abuse, by Importance as Judged by Text Emotional Distress to Victim's Ex-Boyfriend: 25% Victim No Longer Physically Desirable to Ex-Boyfriend: 75%

Who Suffers as a Result of a Woman's Suicide Attempt, by Attribution in Text Her Unborn Child: 70%, Her Boyfriend: 30%

Both according to the viewpoint of Frey, who as we've already established is a horrible self-centred git. Judged and attributed by a character within the text rather than by the text itself.

Who Suffers as the Result of the Murder of an Eight Year Old Girl, as Judged by Text The Eight Year Old Girl: 20%, The Murderer: 80%

Again, this is according to the point of view of the murderer, not judged by the text itself.

Ways In Which An Intelligent, Talented Woman, Who Has Superhuman Strength And Is Nearly Invulnerable to Physical Damage Could Attempt To Rescue Her Companions At Short Notice Steal a Ship and Mount a Rescue: 0% Sneak into Execution and Mount a Rescue: 0% Prostitute Herself: 100%

Jez is somewhat stronger than she would be as a human, can heal from a knock to the head and a flesh wound and is a decent shot, but this hardly makes her anything like invulnerable and it certainly doesn't make her some kind of superhero. The prostitution did irk me, but I mostly saw it as a comment on the way in which she was coming to see herself as an inhuman monster, and an acknowledgement that she was intelligent enough to realise she couldn't have pulled off either of the first two options on her own.

Overall, I think the heart of our disagreement over the book comes down to a preference for or against didacticism. It's something I strongly dislike - I want stories which present interesting situations and complex flawed characters then leave me to make up my own mind about them. Which don't try to insert authorial comment into the mindset of a flawed and potentially unreliable viewpoint character. Which present a sexist and corrupt society as what it is, without feeling the need to explicitly lecture the audience about it.

Judging from your review, particularly those percentage breakdowns at the end, you want a story in which the text and the author tell the audience what they should think of the horrible things that happen and the horrible things the characters do?

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Arthur B

at 15:43 on 2010-09-14Dan said:

Frey spends the first half of the book chiding himself for his selfishness, indolence, and pisspoor leadership skills. By the end of the book he has stopped chiding himself for all of these things

ignisophis said:

Instead, we see a change in his internal attitude and intentions which will maybe lead to a future change in his behaviour

How does going from "I'm quite bothered by my behaviour" to "I'm OK with my behaviour" make it

likely that he's going to change?

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Dan H

at 16:07 on 2010-09-14

Overall, I think the heart of our disagreement over the book comes down to a preference for or against didacticism.

I don't think it has anythign to do with that. Didacticism is one of those irregular adjectives. You're being Didactic, I'm just presenting things as they are. He has an agenda, I'm telling a story.

It's something I strongly dislike - I want stories which present interesting situations and complex flawed characters then leave me to make up my own mind about them.

So do I. Retribution Falls does neither of those things.

Your interpretation of Frey - as a flawed and complex but ultimately sympathetic character, that despite the horrible things he does he is always striving to be a better man - is exactly the one which I complain that the book was forcing down my throat.

Which don't try to insert authorial comment into the mindset of a flawed and potentially unreliable viewpoint character.

Authorial comment is *absolutely* necessary when you're dealing with a flawed and potentially unreliable viewpoint character. Otherwise how do you know they're flawed and potentially unreliable?

Which present a sexist and corrupt society as what it is, without feeling the need to explicitly lecture the audience about it.

You're presenting a false dichotomy here. You seem to believe that the options are "present a sexist and corrupt society in an uncritical and shallow manner" or "lecture people".

I'd also point out that /Retribution Falls/ does not, in fact, present a sexist and corrupt society. It doesn't really present a society at all. It's an adventure novel, it pays no attention to the way its setting would or could actually work. What you take as "presenting a sexist society as it actually is" I take as "just being sexist".

This is what I don't understand. The text *does* tell us what to think about the horrible things that happen, and the horrible things the characters do. It's extraordinarily heavy handed in that regard. Frey's interaction with Trinica is a good example. In the article I quoted the following:

This is telling you exactly how to feel, and exactly why you should be feeling it. Frey did a Terrible Thing in running out on Trinica, and we are supposed to condemn him for running out on her, but recognize that he has accepted responsibility for it and grown as a result. That's what allows you to interpret Frey as a "complex and flawed character".

Frey is only complex and flawed if you interpret his character in exactly the ways the book (very directly, very heavy-handedly) tells you to interpret his character. Otherwise he really is a dickbag with no redeeming features whatsoever and that's not an interesting character to read about.

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http://ignisophis.livejournal.com/

at 16:58 on 2010-09-14

Your interpretation of Frey - as a flawed and complex but ultimately sympathetic character, that despite the horrible things he does he is always striving to be a better man

But that's not my interpretation of Frey. That's how you think the author wants us to interpret Frey. My interpretation of Frey is that he's a flawed and complex and almost entirely

sympathetic character, who doesn't strive to be a better man until we're approaching the end of the book - and even then the motives for his striving are suspect and its eventual outcome uncertain. I don't sympathise with him, but I do pity him, and despite his being a git with virtually no redeeming features I do find him interesting to read about.

Authorial comment is *absolutely* necessary when you're dealing with a flawed and potentially unreliable viewpoint character. Otherwise how do you know they're flawed and potentially unreliable?

From an evaluation of their narrative.

You're presenting a false dichotomy here. You seem to believe that the options are "present a sexist and corrupt society in an uncritical and shallow manner" or "lecture people".

If you're going to rewrite what I say, please don't put quote marks around it! Or at least, use quote marks but put some editorial square brackets around the altered text.

"He didn't pity her. He couldn't. He only mourned the loss of the young woman he'd known ten years ago. This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence." This is telling you exactly how to feel, and exactly why you should be feeling it.

This is our disagreement in a nutshell. You think that excerpt is telling the audience what to feel and why they should feel it. I think that excerpt is telling the audience what

Frey

feels and why he thinks

he's

feeling it. What you appear to read as an objective narrator uncritically describing Frey's reaction in what we are meant to take as reasonable terms, I read as subjective narration by a selfish and dysfunctional viewpoint character speaking in the third person.

I think it's a deeply unhealthy way to feel, and would agree that the book deserved to be killed by fire if it suggested that the audience

was

meant to feel that way about Trinica's condition. Fortunately, I don't think it is.

Is not the definition of a didactic reading of a text the belief that the text is telling us what to do and why we should do it?

And in response to Arthur:

How does going from "I'm quite bothered by my behaviour" to "I'm OK with my behaviour" make it more likely that he's going to change?

If he was genuinely bothered by his behaviour beforehand then he'd have made an effort to change it. I see the transition as going from "I shall self-flagellate about my failings while using my awareness of them to convince myself that tryin to change would be pointless" to "I have failings, but I am making an effort to change". How genuine and lasting that effort is has yet to be seen.

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Dan H

at 17:50 on 2010-09-14

My interpretation of Frey is that he's a flawed and complex and almost entirely unsympathetic character, who doesn't strive to be a better man until we're approaching the end of the book

I think we're using the word "sympathetic" differently. I'm using it to mean "has qualities with which you can sympathize" whereas you seem to use it to mean "has no flaws".

You see Frey as flawed, complex and almost entirely unsympathetic but (presumably) with some redeeming features (you suggest as much in your previous post). Again this is *exactly* the interpretation I believe the text is pushing for.

The problem I have with Frey isn't that he's unsympathetic, it's that he's unsympathetic *in different ways to the ones the text cares about*.

From an evaluation of their narrative.

Which you would do how? I mean seriously how do you know a narrator is unreliable without some clue that comes from outside their narration?

I think it's a deeply unhealthy way to feel, and would agree that the book deserved to be killed by fire if it suggested that the audience was meant to feel that way about Trinica's condition. Fortunately, I don't think it is.

Umm ... I'm a bit confused here. What about the way Frey feels about Trinica's condition are we supposed to disagree with? How do *you* feel about Trinica's condition and how do you think it's different, and how do you think the text supports that feeling?

The book clearly explains to us that Frey had a responsibility to Trinica, that by running out on her he shirked that responsibility, which caused her to attempt suicide and lead to the death of their child, and ultimately to her getting raped and becoming the Dread Pirate Dracken. Frey feels guilty for shirking this responsibility. What about this interpretation do you think is incorrect? How do you think Frey is mistaken here?

Is not the definition of a didactic reading of a text the belief that the text is telling us what to do and why we should do it?

Umm ... yes it is. I read the book as extremely didactic, and dislike it because I consider it to be didactic. You seemed to think that my problem was wanting the book to be *more* didactic, when in fact I want it to be *less* didactic. The book as it stands tells us exactly how to feel about everything in it.

Again, that's exactly my problem and once again, your interpretation of the text lines up exactly with the interpretation I believe the text is telling me to have.

Frey's big flaw, as dictated by the text, is that he runs away from his responsibilities. That is the flaw he spends the book dealing with, and that is the flaw he overcomes at the end when he realizes that he has a duty to his crew.

Frey's real flaw is that he believes everything is about him. The thing is that it *really is*. This isn't a matter of perception, every single person he meets is willing to risk everything to either help or harm him. Even Trinica's suicide attempt was *about Frey* and she freely admits that it was about Frey. This isn't unreliable narration, this isn't the subjective viewpoint of a flawed character, this is how things actually are in the setting.

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Arthur B

at 20:44 on 2010-09-14

Which you would do how? I mean seriously how do you know a narrator is unreliable without some clue that comes from outside their narration?

To be fair, you can do it without outside clues. Gene Wolfe did it quite well in

Peace

- if you take the narrator at his word it's about a nice old man reminiscing about his life, but if you pay attention to the bits where he contradicts himself, glosses over something, or is clearly omitting something you realise that he's a horrifyingly evil person. (To pull a fuzzily-remembered example out of thin air, a particular character just plain disappears partway through the story after a fairly tense conversation with the narrator, and it's only later when he casually mentions possessing a piece of property that most definitely belonged to her that you realise he probably killed her - and if you go back and revisit the scene in question you can put together a fairly good idea of how he did it and how he disposed of the evidence.)

Not that that's necessarily what's happening in Retribution Falls. And I do agree that you do need the contradictions and omissions and whatnot in order to give textual support for interpretations that directly contradict the narrator's own assessment of things. The more internally consistent and solid a narrative is the less wiggle room you have for challenging the statements in it, after all.

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Dan H

at 13:44 on 2010-09-15But that's still a metatextual clue - Wolfe clearly included the reference *specifically* to allow for that interpretation, which is sort of my point.

I'm not saying the text has to stop and say "just so we're clear, the narrator is lying to you here" but it is actually very clear what *is* just viewpoint and what *isn't*. It's like people who will argue that Star Wars is shot from "Luke Skywalker's Viewpoint" and that the Empire might not be evil at all. It's not a legitimate reading of the text, and it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of how viewpoint works in fiction.

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Arthur B

at 14:01 on 2010-09-15Well the other difference is that

Peace

is very much delivered from the narrator's viewpoint - it's all spoken in the first person. It's not Wolfe writing in the third person who tells you that the narrator has the vanished girl's stuff, it's the narrator himself not managing to keep his story straight.

Of course, the other big argument against the "it's OK because he's an unreliable narrator" take on

Retribution Falls

is that as far as I can tell it's written in the third person, which would mean you can't firmly say that the narration is from Frey's point of view. The argument that the narrative voice isn't "subjective narration by a selfish and dysfunctional viewpoint character speaking in the third person" seems to me - unless there's textual support for it somewhere - to be a bit of a leap, when the default assumption in most books is that the narrative voice is objective, omniscient, and impersonal. I'm sure there's been books written in the third person where the narrative voice is in fact subjective, unreliable, and personal, but you'd expect to be tipped off to the fact if that's what you're meant to take away from it.

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Niall

at 14:16 on 2010-09-15

the default assumption in most books is that the narrative voice is objective, omniscient, and impersonal

Say what? No it isn't. I wouldn't even say it's the default assumption in most books written in the third person. In fact, I'd say that in contemporary fiction, an objective, omniscient, impersonal narrative voice is rare.

The specific paragraph being debated above is limited third person. Every sentence is grounded in Frey's subjectivity. For me to read it as an objective assessment of the situation, it would have to stand further outside him: "Frey didn't pity Trinica. It wouldn't do any good. The only thing to do was to mourn the loss of the young woman he'd known ten years ago..."

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Arthur B

at 14:46 on 2010-09-15

Say what? No it isn't. I wouldn't even say it's the default assumption in most books written in the third person.

OK, checking the wikipedia article on narrative modes I see that I've been sloppy about my terms and not used them especially correctly (though I note that over the entire sweep of literature the third-person omniscient has totally been the most commonly used so ya boo sucks :P).

For me the narrative voice came off as impersonal - the very fact that it's the third person seems to point in that direction, for starters. But I'm assessing that on a fairly limited selection of quotes, and I'd need to read a lot more to work out whether the narrative voice is meant to take an over-the-shoulder perspective where it follows Frey but doesn't necessarily condone or identify with him or whether it's meant to be Frey.

This is all, of course, secondary to the question of whether the reader is meant to sympathise or condemn Frey. And the thing is, the various attitudes he expresses, which both Dan and ignisophis agree are problematic, are common enough that I can easily imagine many readers reading the book and thinking "Yeah, that Frey guy's totally got it right - my ex's abortion was all about me too!"

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Arthur B

at 14:48 on 2010-09-15(Also I'd argue that the third-person omniscient has maintained a greater foothold in SF/fantasy than it has in other genres thanks to the influence of Tolkien in fantasy, and various brick-sized multiple-viewpoint novels of the Alastair Reynolds/Peter F. Hamilton variety in SF.)

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Niall

at 15:00 on 2010-09-15

I'd need to read a lot more to work out whether the narrative voice is meant to take an over-the-shoulder perspective where it follows Frey but doesn't necessarily condone or identify with him or whether it's meant to be Frey.

To be pedantic, I'm less interested in whether it's

meant

to be one or the other, and more interested in what it

, if only because we can't know the former and can meaningfully debate the latter. So: I think

Retribution Falls

is basically over-the-shoulder with occasional slips which come about because, when it comes down to it, Wooding is not a particularly impressive writer on a sentence-by-sentence level. It doesn't help that, as you say, the prose has a fairly unexciting default voice, neither strongly

the character it's following nor strongly

not

of the character it's following. Still, I didn't experience the book as didactic in the way that Dan did.

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Niall

at 15:05 on 2010-09-15Do you know, it's so long since I've actually read Tolkien that I can't remember what his narrative is like, but I wouldn't characterise Hamilton as third-person omniscient. From what I remember, even if he follows multiple characters, he sticks pretty tightly to a single character within any given scene. So I'd say he's multiple third-person-limited, and reserve third-person omnisicient for books like

Middlemarch

, where there is a single narrator that wanders between characters whenever it feels like it.

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Arthur B

at 15:05 on 2010-09-15

To be pedantic, I'm less interested in whether it's meant to be one or the other, and more interested in what it is, if only because we can't know the former and can meaningfully debate the latter.

But there's no objective test which will conclusively prove it's one or the other, if it's a borderline case; all we can do is see what it seems like to us, and consider what prompts the text are giving us (the latter of which is what I meant by "meant").

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Arthur B

at 15:07 on 2010-09-15

Do you know, it's so long since I've actually read Tolkien that I can't remember what his narrative is like, but I wouldn't characterise Hamilton as third-person omniscient. From what I remember, even if he follows multiple characters, he sticks pretty tightly to a single character within any given scene.

Yeah, but he'll regularly set up situations using the technique where the characters who are going into a particular situation know much less than we do, because the narrative voice has clued us in to stuff that's been going on which the current viewpoint character doesn't know about. The overall point is to give this helicopter overview of what's happening on a stage covering half a galaxy, which no one character can get a clear picture of but which the narrative voice seems to be showing us as we travel around in its company.

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Wardog

at 15:18 on 2010-09-15I'm with Niall on this - I think it is rare to find books where the narrative voice objective, omniscient and impersonal. Otherwise everything would sound like it was written by Henry Fielding. Most third books have conscious POV shifts, usually between chapters or between scenes, as you move between characters or else are specifically situated as being the perspective of a specific character - the Harry Potter books, for example.

Where it gets difficult is locating the overlapping subjectivity of character and author - and, by author, I mean the hazy figure present in the text, not the person giving interviews to the media.

Sorry to randomly tangent, but this discussion reminds me the discussion about

Sisters Red

over at The Book Smugglers. Essentially Ana condemns the book for its victim-blaming and honestly slightly unhealthy attitude to certain types of girls - later the author inadvisable rocks up in the comments to claim s/he has been misrepresented since the unhealthy victim-blaming stuff was all from a unhealthy character's POV.

Unfortunately "it's okay, it's a bad person saying it" becomes difficult it is very often implicitly supported by the structures of the book itself. to use the Sisters Red example, what you have is a damaged character expressing an offensive viewpoint, the same viewpoint echoed by a less damaged character not two pages later AND a world in which the offensive viewpoint is LITERALLY true. In the world of Sisters Red, girls who dress, look and behave a certain way are, in fact, targeted by predators. Whereas the "dress up pretty will get you raped" mindset is actually not only untrue (since the majority of rapes are committed by people who knew the victim, not strangers jumping on beautiful girls who go clubbing in short skirts) but a control strategy to keep women feeling vulnerable and dis empowered.

To return to the book in question, the issue, I think, is not with Frey's viewpoint itself but with the way the narrative as a whole functions to support it, rather than condemn it. I mean Frey views women in a completely obnoxious but the behaviour of every woman in the text actually reinforces the fact he's right to treat them as he does - I mean everyone he sleeps with, apparently falls madly in love with him and wants him to settle down and twu wuv with her. It doesn't matter how much pseudo bad-assery you paint onto a female character if *her entire life* revolves around a dude then Frey is, in fact, exactly right to view women as clingy, fragile and emotionally demanding.

The whole "He had fashioned her" line is grossly offensive - not least because, in the text, it is actually true.

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Arthur B

at 15:33 on 2010-09-15

Most third books have conscious POV shifts, usually between chapters or between scenes, as you move between characters or else are specifically situated as being the perspective of a specific character - the Harry Potter books, for example.

OK, I've tended to think of multiple viewpoint books as being objective/omniscient/impersonal because the narration isn't exclusively associated with one viewpoint, and gives you an overview of what's going on which no single character actually enjoys - so it averages out as being objective-ish and omniscient-ish and impersonal-ish when you take the book as a whole, but I'm obviously doing great harm to the terminology there so I'll stop.

Though that said, if the main character's ideas are never actually challenged by anything they encounter in the world, it doesn't matter much where the narrator's sitting does it?

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Melissa G.

at 17:35 on 2010-09-15

Though that said, if the main character's ideas are never actually challenged by anything they encounter in the world, it doesn't matter much where the narrator's sitting does it?

That's pretty much my problem with the "But the narrator is unreliable/a bad person so it doesn't matter if their POV is offensive" argument. If you want us to accept that the POV is in an unreliable person's hands, we needs clues in the text.

A good example of it being done right, imo, is Lolita. I don't particularly *like* Lolita, but Nobokov actually did a pretty stellar job of writing from the POV of a pedophile while still providing us with enough textual clues to be able to interpret Humbert Humbert's behavior and mindset as destructive and wrong. It's very subtle and not concrete evidence - hence all the controversy surrounding that book - but I truly believe we're not meant to view Humbert Humbert as *right* in what he does. Lolita displays characteristics of a sexually abused child, for example. Humbert Humbert doesn't pick up on this, but the reader can.

Anyway, back to the original point, I think if a writer is going to have an unreliable narrator or a morality effed up narrator, the text outside the character needs to display at least *signs* that they are effed up and unreliable. If the world bends to their viewpoint, I don't think there's any way that defense works. They are just being proven right, in that case, which is basically what people have stated above, and I agree with.

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Dan H

at 18:40 on 2010-09-15

I think you're right that the specific paragraph is a bad example, but I think part of the confusion here is that people seem to be misunderstanding precisely what I find offensive about Frey's reaction to Trinica and the way it is grounded in the text.

People are focusing a lot on the "didn't pity her" line which is actually the line in the whole thing I find *least* offensive. Pity is a patronizing emotion, and what offended me most about Trinica wasn't the lack of sympathy in the text, it was the lack of *respect*.

As Kyra points out, what's really offensive about the whole thing is the second line: "This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence." What is offensive about this line is not that Frey thinks that way but that the text really does provide strong evidence that he is *right* to think this way.

Frey's *entire* arc (as ignisophis observes) is about going from making excuses for his flaws, to facing up to them and taking responsibility for them. In this context, his taking responsibility for Trinica's condition is presented as both right and correct, and a step on his emotional development towards a better and more complete person. Similarly he *takes responsibility* for his part in the loss of their child, accepting that his cowardice in running away from Trinica was comparable to her cowardice in attempting to take her own life. These are all *personal revelations* which are presented as *unambiguously positive and correct*.

To lay it out clearly, this is a list of things which I consider to be facts about Trinica Dracken which (a) are what Frey believes, (b) are the canonical truth of the setting and (c) are deeply offensive.

1. Trinica attempted to kill herself because Frey left her. Unambiguously true, he admits it, she admits it.

2. Trinica's attempted suicide was motivated partly out of a desire to hurt Frey. She says specifically tells Frey that "I wanted you to know what I had done".

3. Trinica's decision to kill herself was cowardly. Frey believes this, the text does not challenge it, and Frey is presented as developing emotionally when he compares his own cowardice to Trinica's.

4. Trinica's attempted suicide was worse because she was pregnant. Again Frey believes this and the text supports it. Again, Frey's emotional growth comes from his recognition that he *shares* in Trinica's moral culpability for the death of their child.

5. Trinica is a tragic figure. A lot of the argument about what is and is not Frey's PoV seems to come down to the question of whether it is right that he "does not pity" Trinica. What is most certainly *not* subjective, or simply a result of Frey's distorted viewpoint, is that Trinica is *worse off* as a capable, independent Pirate Captain than she was as a nineteen year old china doll.

These are all genuinely, deeply offensive to me - particularly point 3: "suicide is cowardly" is one of the most repugnant ideas to go unchallenged in popular opinion, and a text that repeats it without condemning it reinforces it.

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http://ignisophis.livejournal.com/

at 20:42 on 2010-09-16

I think we're using the word "sympathetic" differently. I'm using it to mean "has qualities with which you can sympathize" whereas you seem to use it to mean "has no flaws".

"I'm [tautology] whereas you [are ridiculous]"? Heh.

In this context I'm using 'sympathetic character' to mean 'a character in whose circumstances I could potentially see myself having similar reactions and making similar choices'. To make it clearer with some examples, in this particular book I find Crake, Harkins, Jez, Malvery and Silo sympathetic. I find Frey and Pinn unsympathetic. Trinica Dracken I find to be about half-and-half.

I mean seriously how do you know a narrator is unreliable without some clue that comes from outside their narration?

I think Arthur and others have already addressed this point. To be clear, I don't consider Frey unreliable in his recounting of facts but I do consider him unreliable in the way he judges and presents those facts. Not due to explicit cues in the text, but by evaluating his judgements and presentations in relation to my own experiences of the real world, in the same way as Melissa suggests the audience is meant to pick up on aspects of "Lolita".

I'm a bit confused here. What about the way Frey feels about Trinica's condition are we supposed to disagree with? How do *you* feel about Trinica's condition and how do you think it's different, and how do you think the text supports that feeling? The book clearly explains to us that Frey had a responsibility to Trinica, that by running out on her he shirked that responsibility, which caused her to attempt suicide and lead to the death of their child, and ultimately to her getting raped and becoming the Dread Pirate Dracken. Frey feels guilty for shirking this responsibility. What about this interpretation do you think is incorrect? How do you think Frey is mistaken here?

As others have said, it's probably not the best idea to get overly hung up on this one paragraph. But to answer your questions...

As you say, one of Frey's big flaws is thinking that everything revolves around him. This is a perfect example. Yes, Frey shirked that initial responsibility, and he is right to feel guilty for doing so - but not so much for the fact that he did so as the manner in which he did so, which is never something he questions because as is stated elsewhere in the text he believes women

need

to be lied to. The crucial error is his assumption that each step led inexorably to the next, as if his initial flight toppled the first in a line of dominoes. The causal links are there but it's not a simple case of "If A Then B", at each step Trinica had a choice in how she reacted and there were multiple other influences on that choice besides the previous steps - such as the culture, her family and the pirates who captured her.

I read the book as extremely didactic, and dislike it because I consider it to be didactic. You seemed to think that my problem was wanting the book to be *more* didactic, when in fact I want it to be *less* didactic. The book as it stands tells us exactly how to feel about everything in it.

My point is that the didacticism doesn't lie in the book itself but in your reading of it. I don't consider it particularly didactic, and Niall appears to agree with me. Furthermore, your review rarely gave me the impression of wanting it to be less didactic - instead you are constantly railing against the book for telling you the wrong things, and rather than not telling you anything you seem to want it to tell you different things: that suicide is not cowardice, that rape is not motivated by beauty, that the person who suffers most in a murder is the victim.

Again, I think you're seeing things in the text that aren't there. For a start, I disagree that that

the way things are in the setting. The first two NPCs we meet, Macarde and Quail, most definitely

aren't

willing to risk everything to help or harm him. After that, most of the focus Frey draws isn't because of who he is but because of what he represents; to the Century Knights and society at large the killer of the prince who was the nation's sole heir, to Duke Grephen and his allies a threat to their conspiracy. The only people willing to risk anything for his sake (besides his crew) are Trinica Drecken and the Thades, all three of whom have solid motives for doing so.

what offended me most about Trinica wasn't the lack of sympathy in the text, it was the lack of *respect*. As Kyra points out, what's really offensive about the whole thing is the second line: "This mockery of his lover was his own doing. He had fashioned her, and she damned him by her existence." What is offensive about this line is not that Frey thinks that way but that the text really does provide strong evidence that he is *right* to think this way.

As I explained above, I don't think the text does provide strong evidence that he is right to think that way. Frey believes it, because he thinks everything is about him, but the reader hopefully has enough awareness of the real world to know that life doesn't work like that. I think part of the problem here is that Trinica is also a dysfunctional and psychologically damaged person, about which I shall go into more detail below.

1 & 2: (a) and (b) hold. But I'm not sure why you're taking offence? People find many reasons to attempt suicide, and it seems odd to take offence at somebody being psychologically vulnerable. (Tangent: The physiological changes brought on by pregnancy are well known to have an effect on mood, a brief google suggests that some people claim natal depression can cause an increased suicide risk while others claim there is a reduced suicide risk during pregnancy; I don't have the knowledge or inclination to properly search and evaluate the medical literature on the subject, but it's entirely possible Wooding didn't do his research properly either and happened across a study claiming an increased risk?). It's not as if the text suggests she was morally or intellectually justified in attempting to kill herself in that situation or for those motives, which is something I could support taking offence at. These are the interactions of two deeply dysfunctional people, and I see them presented as such.

3: (a) and (c) hold, but I think it's a considerable leap to go from "not challenged by the text" to "the canonical truth of the setting". To my mind, your wanting the text to explicitly challenge and condemn this belief of Frey's also counters your claim that you want the text to be less didactic as opposed to just differently didactic.

4: (a) and (c) hold, and it's possible that Trinica believes it as well. But it's only a canonical truth in the sense that certain characters in canon believe it, as with (3) I think there's a difference (at least in fiction) between not explicitly challenging or condemning a viewpoint and presenting it as a valid and objective ethical judgement.

5: Aristotle defined a tragic figure as someone whose misfortune is brought about by some error of judgement. So yes, I agree that Trinica is a tragic figure and that (a) and (b) hold. But I'm not sure what it is about Trinica being a tragic figure that you find offensive?

Whereas I do find it offensive that you characterise her nineteen year old self as a "china doll". We aren't given that much detail about her life at the time but we do know that she was a wealthy heiress and trained pilot capable of romancing Frey against her family's wishes, convincing Frey to say he'd marry despite his reluctance, and even after her suicide attempt and miscarriage able to steal some money and fly off alone in a small aircraft. Yes she was emotionally vulnerable enough to fall obsessively in love with Frey and attempt suicide when he left her standing pregnant at the altar, but to me the rest of that sounds fairly awesome, not particularly badly off and not particularly "china doll" like either.

Whereas she then spent years being raped and abused, stuck in a situation where she had to use her sexuality as a tool for survival and advancement and a culture where violence and murder are commonplace, then remaining in that culture while denying her sexuality and attempting to present herself as something undesirable. Laying aside the fact that despite the way it's glamorised by fiction and cultural mythology piracy is actually rather horrible, her position as a pirate captain may be capable but whether it's more independent than her early life is a position open to much debate. It's also a position in which I'd say that she possesses a lot more 'public agency' but a lot less 'personal agency', and one which I see as reinforcing and perpetuating the psychological damage she's suffered. So yes, I do think she is a great deal worse off.

A lot of the argument about what is and is not Frey's PoV seems to come down to the question of whether it is right that he "does not pity" Trinica.

I think that's in large part due to the choice of example paragraph!

"suicide is cowardly" is one of the most repugnant ideas to go unchallenged in popular opinion, and a text that repeats it without condemning it reinforces it.

I'd find it really intrusive to have an explicit condemnation, and I think the text does challenge it by showing that Trinica is most definitely not a coward.

To close, I just reread the last chapter of the book and noticed something I didn't before this discussion. When Trinica has Frey (and his crew) at her mercy she lets him go with the following dialogue, which I think stands by itself:

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http://ignisophis.livejournal.com/

at 20:44 on 2010-09-16Oops, missed a blockquote closure in my comment, hope the site admins can edit to make it a bit more readable?

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Arthur B

at 22:05 on 2010-09-16

To be clear, I don't consider Frey unreliable in his recounting of facts but I do consider him unreliable in the way he judges and presents those facts. Not due to explicit cues in the text, but by evaluating his judgements and presentations in relation to my own experiences of the real world, in the same way as Melissa suggests the audience is meant to pick up on aspects of "Lolita".

But doesn't this mean that you end up disagreeing with Frey's assessment of his world because you don't buy into his preconceptions and biases, whereas someone who did share his preconceptions would just find them reinforced?

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Niall

at 09:02 on 2010-09-17Arthur: possibly, but (a) I'd be willing to bet that there's no way to write about a character like Frey that a person like Frey wouldn't find a way to sympathise with, (b) Even if you could find a way to make this hypothetical person-Frey find character-Frey unsympathetic, I would imagine they'd just dislike the book rather than be challenged or changed by it, and (c) I don't think it's literature's job to be concerned with the reactions of a hypothetical person-Frey.

I expect to get some disagreement here on (c), and to an extent I'm going to immediately walk it back, because I think that what is missing from ignisophis' analysis -- while I am broadly more in agreement with his reading than Dan's -- is a sense of a structural argument. Trinica's psychological vulnerability isn't offensive just because it's there, it's offensive because there isn't a broad enough range of female characters in the novel for it to seem exceptional, and because there isn't a broad enough range of characters in the sf and fantasy genres for it to seem exceptional; that is, it plays into prevalent and damaging stereotypes.

I would prefer that stories not do that, he said, with heavy understatement. But that's because of how

react to it, not because of how I worry other people might react to it. I don't think it's sustainable, and I do fear that it's arrogant, to pronounce on the latter.

As I say, I agree with much of the rest of ignisophis' response to Dan's five points, particularly

I think it's a considerable leap to go from "not challenged by the text" to "the canonical truth of the setting"

. Absence of endorsement is not endorsement of absence, and as I've already said, I didn't feel shepherded towards one interpretation as Dan did. (In fact, where the female characters are concerned, I was more bothered by Jez than by Trinica (or Amalicia), pretty much because I didn't believe what I was told about Frey's exes -- to build on ignisophis' point, I think the "straightforwardness he'd previously found charming" is a clear hint that young Trinica was

not

precisely the delicate flower Frey imagines her to be -- whereas we get Jez's point of view.) At the same time,

Retribution Falls

is not a good enough book that I want to die in a ditch over it. Also, I'm now late for work. Oops.

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Arthur B

at 09:52 on 2010-09-17

Arthur: possibly, but (a) I'd be willing to bet that there's no way to write about a character like Frey that a person like Frey wouldn't find a way to sympathise with, (b) Even if you could find a way to make this hypothetical person-Frey find character-Frey unsympathetic, I would imagine they'd just dislike the book rather than be challenged or changed by it, and (c) I don't think it's literature's job to be concerned with the reactions of a hypothetical person-Frey.

Ah, but my problem with ignisophis's analysis isn't just it lets people who already agree with Frey off the hook, it also isn't especially helpful for people who already agree with Frey.

If this really is a book the reader has to resort to things that they already know and believe to cobble together an interpretation, which is what ignisophis appears to be saying, then the book isn't really bringing anything new to the table. It's not opening their eyes to another way of looking at the world because it's just asking them to resort to theirs, it's not putting forward any new ideas so much as throwing out facts for people to whip into shape using their own ideas, it's not communicating anything meaningful because the reader finds no meaning or message which they didn't already completely believe in when they picked the book up.

This is something which is, to borrow Dan's terms from the start of an article, alright if you're just talking about a low-investment romp but is troubling if it's something that gets shortlisted for an award. Major landmarks of the SF genre - or any genre, or fiction in general - need to do something more than just saying "Meh, I dunno guys, what do you think?"

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Niall

at 10:18 on 2010-09-17Philosophy-of-awards as well as philosophy-of-reading, eh? It's like you're deliberately

trying

to distract me from work... :-)

I was surprised to see

Retribution Falls

on the Clarke shortlist, I think a lot of people were surprised, there were plenty of books I would rather have seen shortlisted, and had it won, I would have been upset for pretty much the reasons you outline. That said, part of the reason I was surprised was that books like

Retribution Falls

-- by which I mean adventure novels -- just don't get shortlisted for the Clarke very often. And in principle, I would like a definition of "the best science fiction novel of the year" to be able to include really good adventure novels, which do after all make up the bulk of what gets published as sf. So there was an extent to which I was happy to see it on the shortlist, even though I think it's pretty disposable, because it represents an assertion that this sort of thing

can

be the best sf has to offer, and because when reading the six shortlisted books in quick succession, it was a change of pace.

I would be interested to know what people make of

The Fade

, Wooding's previous novel, which I read several years ago and much less attentively than I read

Retribution Falls

, but which I remember as significantly more interesting (and better) on some of the issues we've been discussing here. I'm also quite tempted, now, to pick up the RF sequel

Black Lung Captain

, just to see how things pan out...

Also:

Absence of endorsement is not endorsement of absence

That doesn't actually make any sense at all, does it? Just forget I typed it, stick with what ignisophis wrote.

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Niall

at 10:19 on 2010-09-17

really good adventure novels, which do after all make up the bulk of what gets published as sf.

That is, adventure novels make up the bulk of what's published as sf. Really good adventure novels, sadly, seem to be thin on the ground.

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Arthur B

at 11:14 on 2010-09-17

And in principle, I would like a definition of "the best science fiction novel of the year" to be able to include really good adventure novels, which do after all make up the bulk of what gets published as sf.

Oh, I think there are books that qualify as classics of the genre that basically boil down to being adventure novels - like anything Jack Vance ever wrote. But ideally your pure adventure novel should say "Hey, I'm a pure adventure novel, I'm not trying to say anything profound", which is at least a positive statement, rather than being an abstention from making any kind of statement at all.

(Of course Dan would argue that Redemption Falls doesn't abstain from making any kind of statement at all, but I'm not tackling that so much as I'm taking issue with ignisophis's stance that you can work out how the book is intended to come across by resorting to your own personal knowledge and preconceptions rather than anything in the text.)

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Melissa G.

at 17:53 on 2010-09-17

I'm taking issue with ignisophis's stance that you can work out how the book is intended to come across by resorting to your own personal knowledge and preconceptions rather than anything in the text.)

I see what you're saying here (I think). To bring it back to my original example of Lolita, the only people who will find Humbert Humbert offensive and creepy and wrong are the people who already think "pedophilia is bad". Any pedophile reading the book is likely to walk away thinking, "Yes, exactly, he totally gets it!" The smart, non-pedophile reader will vilify Humbert Humbert, whereas a creepy child-molesting reader is likely to vilify Lolita, that damn little cocktease.

The book does require people to come to it with the preconception of "pedophiles are creepy and wrong", and honestly most people do. Unfortunately for "Retribution Falls" (and I've not read it so I'm just going on what the article/comments have said), most people do not come to a sci-fi novel with a preconceived notion of feminism and an expectation of strong females characters because, as Niall said, it plays into "dangerous stereotypes". These tropes exist so strongly in SF/Fantasy that it's more difficult to assume that the reader will know not to take Frey's attitude as how we are meant to view the world. Granted, this gets into "assuming your reader is an idiot" which can be even more infuriating, but I think this might be what some people are taking issue with. Correct me if I'm wrong. :-)

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Sister Magpie

at 18:25 on 2010-09-17I don't want to weigh in on Retribution Falls since I haven't read it, but I remember Lolita as having a few moments where Nabakov seemed to make it clear that Humbert was wrong too. For instance, doesn't he get sick when he catches sight of Quilty watching Lolita innocently playing with a dog and obviously perving on her, as if he's looking at himself from the outside? And one thing I do remember is one passage where Humbert is describing their happy life together and almost accidentally talks about Lolita crying herself to sleep at night.

The book is mostly in his pov but iirc Nabakov had a real history of writing unreliable narrators so that became a central idea of the book. Pale Fire has a seemingly insane person writing notes on a poem, Despair (I think it was?) is a novel about a guy who finds his exact double...except only the narrator actually thinks they look alike. I'm not sure if this author has the same interest?

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Dan H

at 22:03 on 2010-09-17

I don't want to weigh in on Retribution Falls since I haven't read it, but I remember Lolita as having a few moments where Nabakov seemed to make it clear that Humbert was wrong too

Humbert Humbert is fairly unambiguously wrong in Lolita. This is what I really don't get about "viewpoint" arguments - it's entirely possible for a book to be written from the point of view of a character and still be critical of that point of view.

Heck, Retribution Falls does this with its other viewpoint characters. Crake's chapters are full of his comments about how awful and common everybody else is, but it is extraordinarily clear from the way the book is written that we are supposed to disagree with him.

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Dan H

at 23:28 on 2010-09-17

In this context I'm using 'sympathetic character' to mean 'a character in whose circumstances I could potentially see myself having similar reactions and making similar choices'.

Umm, then you're using a very weird definition of "sympathetic".

I *sympathized* with Humbert Humbert. I wouldn't marry a woman just so I could fuck her daughter.

To be clear, I don't consider Frey unreliable in his recounting of facts but I do consider him unreliable in the way he judges and presents those facts.

But his judgment of those facts is reinforced by the way other people behave and what other people say about him.

. The crucial error is his assumption that each step led inexorably to the next, as if his initial flight toppled the first in a line of dominoes.

Except that there is no evidence in the text that he is incorrect, and quite a lot of evidence in the text that he *is* correct.

My point is that the didacticism doesn't lie in the book itself but in your reading of it.

I think "didacticism" is actually the wrong word to use here. The book is *heavy handed*. It tells you very clearly and explicitly what to think about things. It's not a subtle text.

Again, I think you're seeing things in the text that aren't there ... The only people willing to risk anything for his sake (besides his crew) are Trinica Drecken and the Thades, all three of whom have solid motives for doing so.

But don't the crew, Trinica, and the Thades together represent all of the viewpoint characters and most of the incidental cast. Who's left to not give a damn about him, other than the Century Knights?

I really, really don't understand what you're saying here. You seem to be saying that because something is not true in real life, it should not matter if it is presented as being true in a book, because people will know it is not true in real life? That's *fairly clearly nonsense*.

Fiction, whatever fandom may believe, operates off a set of conventions which are not the conventions of reality. When a character reaches a conclusion as part of an arc which is *all about* their growing sense of personal responsibility and self-awareness, it is *ludicrous* to suggest that the conclusion is meant to be wrong.

Real life doesn't figure into it. I know that black people aren't subhuman monsters, does that mean that

On the Creation of Niggers

should not be interpreted as saying they are?

1 & 2: (a) and (b) hold. But I'm not sure why you're taking offence? People find many reasons to attempt suicide, and it seems odd to take offence at somebody being psychologically vulnerable.

It's offensive because it reduces Trinica to a commentary on Frey. It's offensive because it reinforces Frey's claim to have created Trinica which you've just insisted that the text doesn't reinforce. It's offensive because it contributes to the massive amounts textual evidence that Frey is actually basically right about both Trinica specifically, and about women in general.

If Frey wasn't a misogynist dickbag who believed women were fundamentally weak and needy, it wouldn't have been so much of a problem that the love of his life was fundamentally weak and needy. I might add that while people attempt suicide for a variety of reasons "in order to induce a miscarriage, in order to upset their ex boyfriend" is seldom one of them. Again it makes Trinica sound like a horrible, vicious, hysterical shrew and that's *not* Frey's viewpoint, that's what she's *actually like*.

I genuinely don't understand how your mind works here.

So Frey makes a statement: Trinica's suicide attempt was an act of cowardice. This statement is presented as part of his emotional development, and is reinforced time and again in the narration.

What you seem to be doing is letting your preconceptions from outside the text colour your ability to see what is *actually there*. Frey's beliefs are never challenged, therefore they are facts within the context of the text. That is how fiction works.

No. There isn't.

What the characters in a text believe is what is true in that text, unless there is some other evidence *within* the text that the characters are mistaken.

The Chronicles of Narnia are not about a world where superstitious people mistakenly worship a lion. Star Wars is not about a group of terrorists attacking the legitimate government of the galaxy. Twenty-Four is not a scathing attack on the War on Terror. Harry Potter is not about a manipulative headmaster tricking a selfish idiot-boy into killing himself.

That is not how fiction *works*.

Broadly speaking, what I find offensive is the fact that she's a woman in a refrigerator.

Whereas I do find it offensive that you characterise her nineteen year old self as a "china doll".

Since every single piece of imagery we get of her nineteen year old self is one of fragility and vulnerability, I stand by my phrase.

All of which are infuriating, offensive stereotypes.

The notion that women can only get on in the world by "using their sexuality" (whatever the hell that means) is a myth which fits in *exactly* with Frey's brand of misogynist bullshit. Notice we're never actually told how Trinica got to be captain, only that she "used her sexuality" and of course because she's a WOMAN and therefore has MAGIC WOMAN POWERS that's enough. Because apparently a group of people who will happily rape the shit out of you will also be totally awed by the mystery of your womanhood.

Trinica's entire backstory is founded on rape myths and misogynist bullshit. It is *impossible for her to exist* in a world in which a bunch of offensive, apologist bullshit about rape, sexuality and sexual power are not canonically true.

I'd find it really intrusive to have an explicit condemnation, and I think the text does challenge it by showing that Trinica is most definitely not a coward.

When?

Trinica is totally a coward. She's weak, pathetic and trapped. Hell you say as much yourself when you talk about how much worse off she is now than when she was an heiress. She's totally broken by everything that happens to her and transparently has nothing left to live for. She does dangerous shit, but that's because she's effectively dead already.

You don't think maybe that was just a cheap cop-out to avoid having yet *another* improbable escape?

Whatever she says (after all, aren't you the one who insists that what characters say can't be taken at face value) her *entire life* still revolves around Frey. Her *entire purpose* in the book is to provide Frey with something to angst about.

She's an awful, stereotypical, insulting character.

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Niall

at 09:50 on 2010-09-18

Crake's chapters are full of his comments about how awful and common everybody else is, but it is extraordinarily clear from the way the book is written that we are supposed to disagree with him.

Can you pin down what the difference is? Ideally, I guess, with examples, which specific sentences you think make clear we're meant to disagree with Crake, the ones that are missing from Frey's chapters. I feel like we're getting a bit lost in the generalities, at this point.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 01:04 on 2011-06-18Well, I've started on Dan's old copy of this book (Thanks again for shipping it to me!), and right now I'm in broad agreement with his assessment of Capt. Cockspank. I've read stuff that's worse than this (I'm looking at you, Stephen Hunt and George Mann), and I give Wooding credit for avoiding the creepy ultraviolence those guys like to delve into, but RF is really a shallow book. I've haven't run into Trinica yet, but I've got past Frey's encounter with Amalicia at the convent, and that whole sequence was pretty sophomoric.

Actually, this whole thing has started me wondering about how George Macdonald Fraser managed to make Flashman as much of a pig as Frey and still be a fun character to read about. Right now I'm juggling between Flashman's self-awareness, the fact that his transgressions always come back to bite him in the ass, and the simple fact that he's actually funny and has a brain or two in his head.

(On a side note, the story has me wondering yet again how vulnerable the "air pirate" pseudosubsubgenre is to technological progress. Most of the stuff I've seen never seems to stray much beyond the 1920s and 1930s tech-wise, so I'm wondering if this is a fantasy realm that can't survive in an era of radar, missiles, and jet engines. Hey, I'm a child of alternate history. This is how we think, dammit!)

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/0txE6GYMzdiwjPOqDTwLdeHMvOdijS5Jm1c-#9995a

at 05:52 on 2011-06-18

On a side note, the story has me wondering yet again how vulnerable the "air pirate" pseudosubsubgenre is to technological progress. Most of the stuff I've seen never seems to stray much beyond the 1920s and 1930s tech-wise, so I'm wondering if this is a fantasy realm that can't survive in an era of radar, missiles, and jet engines.

It's probably possible, but you'd run the risk of jumping straight from "air pirates" to "space pirates" toting lasers that can vaporise half a mile of woodland countryside in the blink of an eye.

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https://me.yahoo.com/a/0txE6GYMzdiwjPOqDTwLdeHMvOdijS5Jm1c-#9995a

at 10:34 on 2011-06-18

It's probably possible

I meant to put in "to write a novel featuring air pirates in a modernistic setting" right after that. Sorry, bit of an oversight on my behalf.

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https://profiles.google.com/Iaculoid

at 12:38 on 2011-06-18You could probably take some cues from modern pirates, like the ones operating off the coast of Somalia. Our hypothetical air pirates would probably fly fast, stealthy, and heavily-customised craft up-gunned from civilian marques and 'liberated' from their country's collapsed military, forcing down every cargo plane and airliner that enters their airspace and ransoming off their crew and payloads to the parent countries.

All you'd need is a slight advance in aircraft technology and its general commercial availability, as a matter of fact.

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Arthur B

at 13:57 on 2011-06-18

All you'd need is a slight advance in aircraft technology and its general commercial availability, as a matter of fact.

Perhaps not even that. Posit a Cold War era proxy war in which the US or Soviets armed one side with an air force... let the proxy war (and the superpower funding) die off with the end of the Cold War, and have all of these planes sat there with nobody especially keen on asking for them back (because that'd mean admitting the superpower's level of involvement in the war) and no effectual government to take charge of them. Throw in a bunch of fighter pilots owed a heap of back pay and with families to clothe and feed and protect in the anarchy that the war has left behind.

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https://profiles.google.com/Iaculoid

at 16:46 on 2011-06-18Indeed so. You'd even see several piratical conventions return with the aid of modern technology, like flying under false colours. Instead of, say, baiting in pirates with a lumbering freighter hiding a company of heavily-armed marines on board, you'd see stuff like military fighters using radar-reflectors to disguise themselves as juicy, tempting commercial aircraft.

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Alasdair Czyrnyj

at 01:11 on 2011-06-21Wow, you guys are all way more creative about modern air piracy that I am. I've toyed with the idea once or twice, but I just ended up decided that the precision machinery/know-how needed to keep modern planes going would be too much for a pirate outfit to afford. (Then again, I've rarely wondered about where airship pirates get their hydrogen/hydrogen knockoff, so maybe I'm being too close-minded here.)

Anyway, I've finished the book, and I've got to agree with the general consensus. I personally found that Frey's arc essentially read as a transition from a self-centered asshole to a self-promoting asshole (a.k.a. The Kirk09 Character Arc). I personally found Jez the most interesting character, though I felt she needed a meatier role (perhaps in a better book than the one she got stuck in).

One thing really irked me though, and it's something I haven't seen any other reviewers pick up on: the pilot Harkins. In the one chapter where he gets to be a viewpoint character, his interior monologue makes it clear that he's suffering from a pretty severe form of PTSD. And yet, his main purpose in the book is to be mocked for his "cowardice."

Not cool at all.

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https://profiles.google.com/Iaculoid

at 22:25 on 2011-06-21Yeah, I think that if you're disputing modern air-pirate concepts on grounds of realism (particularly Arthur's very down-to-earth redundant-pilots scenario), then you probably need to ask yourself some serious questions about why there weren't vast fleets of corsair zeppelins floating above London in the '20s.

In fact, I'd say that some old Cold War-surplus jets in a camouflaged airbase actually seem easier to operate than some fancy pirate airship. Could be wrong, though - my experience with airships is... less than exhaustive.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 09:03 on 2011-06-22I would think it is a question of familiarity. Airships have that air of classy obsoleteness about them, everybody knows they're not very practical as weapons of war and perhaps that whole slow ballooniousness makes them seem easier to supply and operate. Jet fighters on the other hand are well known as deadly and hugely expensive machines which require the financial capabilities of a nation state or a huge corporation to keep in the air. You also get the feeling that even if an airship has its problems, if it is filled and operational, it's quite autonomous; for example zeppelins flew to South America and back on a pleasure cruise. So a rogue airship, if it was armoured or whatever, could supply itself from the country side or land for a stop in different places, whereas a fighter needs a separate ground crew and all those facilities to remain operational from one day to the next.

So, airships could be more mobile basewise and thus it adds to the romance?

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Vermisvere

at 09:45 on 2011-06-22Perhaps the airship could serve as a mobile base and lift-off point for the jet fighters - sort of like a modern-day aircraft carrier, only airborne. Throw in some anti-aicraft turrets to be manned by the crew against hostile jets and airships and you've more or less got your pirate airship of the future.

In short, a militarised version of

this

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https://profiles.google.com/Iaculoid

at 14:18 on 2011-06-22Well, that'd certainly deal with the problem of having fixed, vulnerable airstrips on the ground for the military to demolish (though they'd best hope it's capable of landing planes of any size, or they'll still need somewhere to force their captives down onto). Plus it would serve as a convenient shorthand for 'hey, aircraft technology is really cheap and easy to use now!'.

Depends on how high-tech you want your air-pirates to be, I guess. Either daring, desperate wash-outs on a shoestring budget, or organised, brutally efficient criminals who are practically running a major corporate enterprise.

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http://ruderetum.blogspot.com/

at 14:21 on 2011-06-22Or an upgrade on

this

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Steve Stirling at 05:18 on 2011-07-13

I'm going to start by pointing out that having one female character out of seven is the worst possible option. Zero out of seven, and you have a setting in which women don't fly airships, which is absolutely fine. Put in exactly one, and you suddenly have a society where women are apparently perfectly accepted on the setting equivalent of the Spanish Main, but never the less you've only got one in your crew. Zero is a better number than one in this situation is all I'm saying.

-- not saying the book is good on male-female relations, but this bit is pretty accurate with respect to much of history. In other words, there -were- women pirates on the Spanish Main. Not many, but they existed, both in male disguise or 'disguise' and, still more rarely, as women.

And there was a well-known woman who became a captain in the Russian cavalry during the Napoleonic Wars, and was allowed to stay on by special order of the Czar after she was 'found out'.

The usual attitude was, inconsistently:

a) "everyone knows" that women are too weak, fragile and vulnerable to do this (for various values of 'this'), but;

b) Cynthia/Alice/Whoever is a good troop and we don't tell the Captain about her because she's hauling her weight and we need her, and besides she'd kill anyone who blabbed, like she did Frank.

In other words, women were present, but rarely; they weren't accepted, but could occasionally push their way in, with guile, luck, great ability and incredible determination.

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Michal

at 06:10 on 2011-07-13There's only one thing I thought when I saw that cover:

Airship Pirate!

#Ferretbrain #Retribution Falls #Chris Wooding #Minority Warrior #Dan H

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