100 Books that Influenced Me, #49: Emperor Mage

[osprey_archer]

Writing about Wild Magic last week reminded me of my very favorite book in the Wild Mage quartet, possibly my favorite Pierce book overall (although my favorite series is Protector of the Small): Emperor Mage, in which Daine is part of a diplomatic envoy to Tortall’s frenemy Carthak, and ends up releasing a dinosaur army on the palace when she believes that the eponymous Emperor Mage Ozorne has executed her teacher Numair, who was Ozorne’s erstwhile best friend, until Ozorne exiled him from Carthak and then Numair got all buddy-buddy with Tortall.

Other highlights include:

Ozorne’s aviary. The birds are great, and I also love the scene where Ozorne creates a little illusion Numair and squashes it. OZORNE YOU DRAMA QUEEN.

Lindhall Reed and his delightful animal habitats.

Daine’s tiny monkey friend Zekoi. In general Daine’s animal sidekicks - indeed, the animal sidekicks throughout Pierce’s novels are A++.

I could go on enumerating the many beauties of Emperor Mage. However, these posts are at least theoretically about how these books influenced me, and in the case of Emperor Mage this comes down to one character: Varice Kingsford, Ozorne’s party planner and Numair’s ex-girlfriend.

Now if you were exposed at all to American pop culture in the 1990s, then you could see right away that Varice fits a certain type: she’s the curvaceous girly blonde who has sex appeal and knows how to use it, and even as a fifth grader I knew that a character who has feminine wiles and uses them is usually Bad. Sometimes there’s an exception for the main character - if she flirts, she may be taking control of her sexuality in a 90s girl power kind of way - but flirty secondary characters: Bad.

(You can actually see this dynamic in Pierce’s earlier Song of the Lioness quartet. When Alanna sleeps with Prince Jon, she’s making a feminist statement by deciding not to save her virginity till marriage. But Jon’s other lovers, the beautiful blondes Josiane and Delia, end up as part of the conspiracy against his throne.)

So you could have knocked me over with a feather when it turns out that Varice is not, in fact, in league with all of Ozorne’s most evil plans. She has all these qualities that often stood in for female badness in pop culture at the time, and yet she is not, in fact, a bad person at all! It blew my tiny eleven-year-old mind.

Comments

[copperfyre]

Varice also has that amazing scene where (as I remember it, I suspect I paraphrase a lot) Numair goes "But why don't you use your magic for better things, not making awesome cakes and social events?" and she responds "This is what I want to do with my magic, this gives me joy and satisfaction." and the narrative is all 'And that's great and Varice should not be given grief for this!'. That was kind of a mind-blowing moment for small me.

Also I do adore Daine's whole revenge rampage, it is amazingly satisfying. Protector of the Small is also my favourite series, but I love Emperor Mage so much.

[osprey_archer]

YES. MAKE YOUR GIANT CAKES, VARICE.

There are few sequences in literature more satisfying than Daine's revenge rampage. It's like Tamora Pierce just unleashed her id and it went DINOSAUR SKELETONS TAKE DOWN A PALACE and honestly we should all have ids that awesome.

[copperfyre]

I suspect I wasn't supposed to end up loving Varice as much as I do, and yet, here we are. MAKE THE BEST RIDICULOUS PARTIES VARICE <3

Sometimes I just go and reread the dinosaur rampage chapters when I'm feeling really down, and it never fails to make me feel at least slightly better about things!

[carmarthen]

Daine is the worst diplomat, heh, but I too would like a skeleton dinosaur army.

I need to reread this, especially after reading the Disappointing Numair Book, which seems to have retconned a lot of things in very dull ways.

(I think Delia was a brunette. I vaguely recall them being kind of a matched set of Popular Girls Are Actually Evil. But Pierce has gotten better about unpacking that, so props to her.)

[osprey_archer]

It's a good thing Pierce made up that curing-the-sick-birds reason for Daine to go to Carthak because otherwise that would have been the WORST decision on the part of literally every high government official in Tortall. THE WORST.

I feel that the Disappointing Numair Book made Varice much more sensible and down to earth in a typical Pierce-heroine type of way, which is a characterization I would have been fine with if we hadn't already met Varice, Queen of Ridiculous Fancy Parties... but as it was I wanted more Fancy Party Varice and less Badgering Numair and Ozorne to Eat Varice.

I hold out a tiny candle flame of hope that Numair & Ozorne's friendship will go bad in a friends-to-lovers-to-BITTER-ENEMIES way in the next book, but sadly I'm like 99% sure that's not going to happen. We could have had it allllll!

Delia may indeed have been a brunette; it's been ages since I've read Song of the Lioness, I ought to do something about that.

[carmarthen]

I didn't remember Emperor Mage being all that sympathetic to Varice, but I don't know if that's my memory or different interpretations. But huh, yeah, that is a different take - I think perhaps Pierce has trouble with sympathetic characters who are too "frivolous" - like, the noble women in Lioness Rampant get respect when they use thread magic or act cool in a conflict; Thayet is ridiculously beautiful but not very concerned with her appearance; etc. So perhaps to make Varice a major sympathetic character she had to turn her into someone with more underlying practicality? IDK. I just found all three of them seriously off, although I do ship Numair and Ozorne more than I used to, heh.

(I always have to remind myself about Delia and Josianne's hair colors, because they FEEL like they should be the other way around. But I have at least one Delia WIP somewhere and subscribe to Ankhiale's apparently fandom-unpopular theory about Grandfather Jasson's conquest of the Hill Country being part of Alex and Delia's motivation because dammit, it's a GOOD theory that makes sense with the text even if I'm sure Tammy never intended anything of the sort. I think in a way even though the writing in SOTL is the least mature, you can tell that it was originally conceived as an adult novel - there are a lot more dark corners, and they're only a generation or two from Tortall making an effort at empire-building. The forced mystical integration of the Bazhir isn't Tortall isn't exactly...great...either. I think in later books the worldbuilding goes in other, more YA-friendly directions. And Tammy isn't good at continuity, heh.)

[osprey_archer]

I don't think Emperor Mage is super sympathetic to Varice, but I wasn't expecting it to be sympathetic to her at all (IIRC tiny!me expected Varice to be up to her eyeballs in Ozorne's worst plots) so any sympathy at all seemed like a lot in relation to that. But yes, making Varice more practical as part of making her a main character struck me as a very Pierce move: practicality is one of the top sympathetic traits in any Tamora Pierce verse.

"Delia and Alex are bitter about the conquest of the Hill Country" makes a lot of sense! But I'm also 99% sure that it's not the intended reading at all, and also really highlights the dark side of Tortall, which I think a lot of fans are not really in the fandom for, (having said that, I'm not too up on the State of Tortall Fandom these days, who knows what current fans are into) - anyway, I can imagine that a lot of people aren't into it.

[carmarthen]

Oh yeah, I get why a lot of Tortall fandom isn't in it for the dark bits and trying to fanwank the worldbuilding gaps. It's why Tortall is one of my perennial fandoms but one I've never really been *in* - I just want something very different than most people (same with Star Wars, although there what I mostly want is worldbuilding crackfic about sarlacc hobby forums).