osprey_archer | Entries tagged with author: tamora pierce

Stealing

troisoiseaux’s five question meme! I've been given five questions to answer and I'll give the first five commenters their own five questions.

1. How did you pick your default icon?

I’ve had this default icon for well over a decade now. I wanted something that wasn’t fandom-specific, because I knew that if it was a particular fandom icon I’d have to change it out when my fandom interests drifted, and I like the suggestion of daydream and imagination in the girl gazing out the open window.

2. Have you ever read a fic that you liked better than the source material (or that you liked despite not being familiar with the source material)?

Ahahaha so in my misspent youth I read LOTS of fic for fandoms with which I was unfamiliar (look, it was all right there on the crack_van LJ community, what do you want from me?), chief among them Man from UNCLE. Much later I saw a few episodes of the show, but I never really got into it, and if I’d been strictly truthful in the historical note in Honeytrap I would have copped to the fact that the germ of the idea came straight from the fanfic with no intervention from the show itself.

3. What's your favorite type of nature (forests, ocean, etc.)?

Forests, particularly northern forests: birch woods, spruce woods, the heavy dark trees and the stony shores of Lake Michigan behind.

4. What was your favorite class in undergrad?

Oh, this is hard to answer! This is not one specific class, but probably my Russian classes - I was with basically the same group all the way through, and we had class every day (the first year it was at 8:30 every morning), plus Russian table once a week and a yearly trip to the campus’s forest retreat Bjorklunden, where after dark the night before Easter we walked around the Bjorklunden chapel trying to keep our candles alight…

The Russian department did a wonderful job conveying not just the language but the history and the culture and the literature of Russia: in first year Russian they already had us reading Korney Chukovsky’s children’s poems and Daniil Kharms’ micro-stories. It’s fascinating to feel that you’re learning not just a language but a whole universe.

5. What's a childhood favorite media that didn't hold up to the nostalgia, and one that definitely does hold up?

When I was about eleven I fell headlong into a Tortall obsession, particularly with Daine the Wildmage and Keladry of Mindelan (and even now, you will pry Kel from my cold dead hands), but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more aware of the shortcomings of the prose and the, IDK, underlying imperialism of the books’ worldview? The selectively approved-of imperialism. When Carthak conquers people it’s Bad, but when Tortall conquers people it’s whatever.

I don’t think you need to agree with the underlying worldview of a book to enjoy it: for God’s sake, I read Mary Renault. But the Tortall books are meant to be didactic - their didacticism is part of what I liked about them! I liked the fact that they were so baldly in-your-face about their feminism, so blatantly enraged by the limits that society sets on girls. So it becomes a real problem when some of the lessons turn out to be wrong.

On the other hand, Lillian and Russell Hoban’s Frances books are just as good as ever. What’s not to love about a sometimes cranky badger child who likes to sing to herself and go on long expeditions with picnics?

28. How did you first get into fanfic, and what was the first fandom you wrote fic for?

Didn’t we already have this question? I guess technically the earlier question was “What was the first thing you ever contributed to a fandom?”, which seems a bit more inclusive, actually, as someone might be an avid gif-maker, say, but not a fanfic writer.

Actually, it occurs to me that I answered that question incorrectly: my first fandom contribution (if it can be termed that) was a Fearless fansite that a friend and I started on Yahoo (I think) when we were in junior high. We emailed fanfic writers on fanfiction.net and asked if we could archive our fic there, which in retrospect sounds gauche, but a surprisingly large number of them said yes.

I also remember being deeply puzzled by the sprinkling of Gaia/Heather fics on ffn, because Gaia and Heather hated each other in the books (at least for most of the series, they do reach a rapprochement later on), and little baby me Did Not Understand why you would ship two people who so clearly despised each other. It just didn’t compute. And also if you are going to ship Gaia with a girl, I mean, Mary is RIGHT THERE.

But! Going back to the first part of this question, “how did you first get into fanfic?” Baby’s First Fanfic was Tamora Pierce fic, specifically Wildmage fic, on vividly colored Geocities sites, although I believe I stumbled on fanfiction.net fairly quickly. The first fic I remember reading was a Wildmage/Moulin Rouge fusion with Daine as a prostitute; this was probably not the first fic I actually read, but it stuck in my mind because the idea of changing the whole premise of the story like that broke my tiny brain just as much as Gaia/Heather.

I read a lot of books about tomboys when I was young. I don’t know how much this was a result of my reading preferences and how much it simply reflected the prevalence of tomboy books in the 1990s, but either way I came away from it with the impression that all proper heroines dislike women’s work in general and sewing in particular.

I didn’t exactly have a big a-ha! moment when I read Tamora Pierce’s Sandry’s Book, but reading about a heroine whose stitchery is literally magic did start putting the dominoes in place to knock out an epiphany eventually.

In fact, one of the things that the Circle of Magic books do really well is take a particular false dichotomy in feminist pop culture - women’s work sucks and all true heroines hate it OR women’s work is valuable and it’s actually more feminist to have a heroine who loves it (I think this one is often a defensive reaction to the plethora of tomboy books) - and basically explode it. Sandry has sewing magic (traditionally feminine); Daja has blacksmithing magic (traditionally masculine); and Tris has weather magic, which is not gendered on the grounds that it is generally beyond the ken of us mere mortals, and they’re all powerful mages with absolutely necessary skills.

In recent years I’ve become a very strong proponent of the importance of having multiple heroines, or at least multiple important female characters, because there’s only so much variety you can show with one character, you know? Especially if she has to be exemplary because she’s the only female character in the thing and therefore is supposed to somehow represent all women everywhere.

(This insight I think is also applicable to characters from other marginalized groups.)

Other fine qualities about Sandry’s Book in particular and the Circle of Magic quartet in general:

The found family vibes are top notch, A++.

Lark and Rosethorn. I totally didn’t get that they were a couple the first time I read the books (or the second, third, fourth…), but I doubt the book would have been published with any more explicit acknowledgment of that fact, and it blew my tiny mind when I heard about it years later.

The general existence of Tris. (Did the “Tris goes to Lightsbridge” book ever happen? I’m not as up on my recent Tamora Pierce books as I should be. I still haven’t read Battle Magic. Should I read Battle Magic?)

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.

I struggled over which Tamora Pierce book to write about for “100 Books that Influenced Me,” and in the future I may yet break down and write about some of the others (Page is a strong contender, or Sandry’s Book) - but Wild Mage is the first Tamora Pierce book that I read and the series that inducted me into the strange, beautiful world of online fandom, because I finished the series and I desperately wanted more Daine.

One of the first fics I found was a story where Daine worked in a brothel a la Moulin Rouge. It’s probably a good thing that I realized so soon just how, hmm, fandom fandom can be.

It also led me to the online community of Sheroes, which I read avidly even though I never posted, but instead watched yearningly from the sidelines as other people built online friendships. How did they do it? It seemed like magic to me. It still seems like magic to me, even now that I’ve emerged from the shadows to make online friends myself, that we can turn words on the screen and a little avatar into a real emotional connection with the person on the other end.

What was it about Wild Mage that so captured me? Daine is a great heroine: brave, occasionally impulsive, with a tragic backstory designed to delight an eleven-year-old, and most of all - the ability to talk to animals!

I’m so glad I discovered Daine before I found internet fandom, because if I'd been steeped in anti-Mary-Sue culture beforehand it might have spoiled my enjoyment about the ever-more-overpowered Daine. But as it was I loved her ever-escalating powers, and I’ve come back around to loving it again. You wouldn’t want every character in the world to be like that, and sometimes there’s something to be said for subtlety, but sometimes you want your girl-power wish-fulfillment avatar characters to come riding in on the reanimated skeleton of a dinosaur in one of the most epic revenge scenes of all time. Edmond Dantes wishes his revenge where this epic.

The explicit girl-power messages where a huge part of the appeal. I know I’ve posted about this before, but there have been an influx of new people within the last few months so I might as well say it again - although people often speak slightingly of didacticism in children’s books, I think there are specific books that become beloved not despite but because of their didactic content, because they say loud and clear a message that certain readers want and need to hear.

I do think this tends to age less well than the more subtle approach, but sometimes the important thing is not aging well - it’s what a reader needs right now. I try to remind myself of this if I get annoyed by what strikes my adult self as irritatingly plain didacticism in children’s books these days: maybe someone needs to read this now; maybe this author will be someone else’s Tamora Pierce.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finally finished Tempests and Slaughter. I still stand by my original criticisms - this book is at least twice as long as it needs to be and nothing much happens - but at the same time it doesn’t really matter, because I am now super invested in Arram & Ozorne & Varice’s friendship (or… OT3ship. Just saying) and when/if I reread Emperor Mage I’m going to spend the whole book howling “WHY CAN’T YOU JUST BE FRIENDS AGAIN THIS IS SO SAD.”

Like. It’s as if, instead of following up Woman Who Rides Like a Man with Lioness Rampant, Tamora Pierce had time-jumped ten years for a fourth book in which Jon (Ozorne) held an enormous judge against Alanna (Arram) for dumping him, while George (Varice) still serves Jon but is also still kind of in love with Alanna and just really wants to repair Jon & Alanna’s friendship so they can all be friends again, but it’s totally impossible because Jon is filled with bitterness and also Alanna has fallen in love with her hot super-powerful squire (the Daine character, to be played by Neal probably?).

That is what reading Emperor Mage is going to be like now that I've read Tempests and Slaughter. THE SADDEST. SO SAD. FILLED WITH SADNESS.

It’s also going to hurt so much when we see Ozorne turn against Numair and exile him and stuff. UGH WHY ARE PREQUELS A THING, THEY MAKE EVERYTHING HURT.

What I’m Reading Now

Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind, which I’m hoping to finish in time for F/F Friday, although if I don’t… there's another Friday next week.

Also Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty, which I am finding slightly less enthralling than Capital Dames, but I think this is because I’m generally more interested in the Civil War than the War of 1812… Although it is kind of interesting to see that for a while it was a toss-up whether the fledgling US would end up at war with Britain or France.

I’ve also continued on in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Chimney-corner, and I’m wondering a bit whether Stowe is making Christopher Crowfield, the male penname of the narrator of these essays, insufferable on purpose. He’s like the personification of mansplaining, good grief.

I did find her chapter about communal house-keeping interesting, though, where she suggests that American villages should emulate the French by installing a bakery, a cook-shop, and a laundry in every hamlet: “Now I put it to the distressed ‘Young Family Man ’ whether these three institutions… would not virtually annihilate his household cares, and restore peace and comfort to his now distracted family.” (140)

It occurs to me that this vision has more or less come to pass: no one has to bake or even cook unless they want to (although I imagine Stowe would have Things To Say about the quality of Wonder Bread, instant noodles, and microwave dinners), and while a laundromat is not exactly a town laundry, the entire laundry process has become so much easier since Stowe’s day that it almost doesn’t matter.

What I Plan to Read Next

This is not exactly a “what I’m reading next” because the book won’t be out for ages, but DID YOU know that the Most Comfortable Man in London will be back - in the second book of what is evidently going to be an entire prequel trilogy - which book is called The Vanishing Man? It involves art theft! ART THEFT. One of my favorite types of fictional theft! (It looks like it ends in murder here, so it’s not a 100% art theft mystery, but still.)

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

James McPherson’s Drawn with the Sword: Reflections on the American Civil War, which is a collection of short essays about, well, what it says on the tin. I think my favorite is the one where he attempts to explain to academic historians that military history is important because wars, like, change things, which seems so self-evidently obvious that you shouldn’t have to write a whole essay about it, but I once attempted to convince my grad school classmates of the same thing and no one was buying it. Who cares about guns when there’s discourse loose in the world?

I suspect that historians’ discourse obsession grows out of the fact that historians may, if they are very lucky, actually affect the discourse. Don’t we all like to think that we’re doing the most important work in the world? It’s a bit awkward therefore if “changing the discourse” is only the first step, and leads to nothing at all if no one amasses guns or money or votes to make changes to physical reality instead of just the paper universe. Who would remember Thomas Paine if George Washington and the Continental Congress hadn’t acted on “Common Sense?” He would have been nothing but a crank.

I finished Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females: Plural Marriage and Women’s Rights in Early Mormonism, which unfortunately I never really warmed to. It’s very much “this happened then this happened then this happened,” and many of the things are happening to men: so-and-so gets sent off on a mission to Hong Kong and we follow him there and back even though he accomplishes nothing and the whole thing has very little to do with the supposed topic of the book, except insofar as plural marriage made it much harder for Mormonism to win converts. Lots of people thought that was just too weird.

The most interesting parts, I thought, where the nuggets of information of how people in nineteenth-century America dealt with marriages that went sour. They didn’t necessarily plod on in misery together forever: legal divorce was hard to get, but partners would nonetheless go their separate ways and often marry other people, technically bigamously, but who’s going to know if your first marriage was in Maine and your second is in Utah?

The Mormon church became popular among women in part because it had a more liberal stance on divorce than much of American society at the time: Brigham Young held that married couples living together without love were committing a kind of adultery. Some of his own wives were woman who legally were married to someone else.

What I’m Reading Now

I’ve finally made some progress on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter! But honestly the main impression I have gotten from this book is that I have outgrown Tamora Pierce, or possibly that this book needed a harsh editor, because I’m over a hundred pages in and nothing is happening.

I’ve also begun Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Gates Ajar, which was a runaway bestseller about a girl who lost her brother in the Civil War (this was published in 1868) and is inconsolable with grief until her cousin comes and teaches her a new, cozier vision of heaven, where you get to meet your loved ones again, rather than just standing about stiffly in robes singing eternally with choirs of angels.

I would have made more progress in this, but Mary’s grief is so keen that it keeps making me sort of sniffly and I’m reading it at work so clearly we can’t be having with that. Nineteenth-century writers are truly ruthless when they want to make you cry.

I’ve also begun a reread of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, preparatory to watching the movie. One of my friends loved it and another loathed it, so we’ll just see, I guess. The book is still a delight and a half.

What I Plan to Read Next

“If only there was a book about women in the silent film industry,” I lamented not too long ago. “Not just the actresses but the directors, the screenwriters, the women behind the scenes.”

It exists! It is Pink-slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries and I am going to read it.

What I’ve Finished Reading

Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy, which I liked more than I expected, but not so much that I intend to read the sequels. The story begins when it is prophesied that the prince’s bride will come from an isolated mountain village. Therefore, all the village girls are therefore sent to a Princess Academy for a year to learn how to be ladies before the prince meets them at the ball.

It’s a set-up that suggests that the girls are going to compete with each other to win the princess, complete with several stereotypes that seem inevitable in this kind of girl: the snobby outsider, the mean girl who fights to win. But then the book sets out to undermine the expected storyline: there is some competition, but the girls also work together, and the bad girls turn out to have more complicated personalities than it first appears.

But it feels somewhat mechanical - like Hale went into it with a list of tropes she wanted to subvert and carefully ticked them off her list. It’s competent, but never really catches fire.

Frances Hodgson Burnett’s That Lass O’Lowrie’s, on the other hand, is all fire from start to finish. Some of my predictions from last Wednesday reading meme turned out to be incorrect (not everyone I expected to get engaged did so - but then I think it’s only a matter of time before they do), but on the whole it’s a satisfying and weird book - although sometimes only weird because it’s a Frances Hodgson Burnett book. If it was any other nineteenth century writer, Joan’s prominent conversion to Christianity would be absolutely par for the course.

I also read another Aunt Dimity book, Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin. Good cozy comfort reading, as always. There ought to be more mystery series that don’t always center on murders. Not that I don’t like a good murder as much as the next person, but variety is the spice of life.

What I’m Reading Now

Still working on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter and Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, and by “working on” I mean I haven’t made much progress at all in either one. It’s been a busy week! Neither one is really grabbing me! I got totally distracted by Aunt Dimity. :(

I have made some good progress in Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A House Full of Females, at least. As the book has gone on we have gotten a higher concentration of women’s diaries and letters, but it’s still a very different book than I expected based on her earlier book, The Age of Homespun, which dissects ideas about women’s work and the age of homespun as a patriotic American myth about an edenic lost past of wholesome home-based industry.

A House Full of Females has much less analysis and much more purely chronological history of the Mormon migration to Salt Lake City - and the analysis of Mormon polygamy in the context of nineteenth-century gender norms is what I really wanted to read about. Oh well.

What I Plan to Read Next

I suppose I’d better start reading I’ll Give You the Sun for my September reading challenge, “a book recommended by a librarian or indie bookseller.” I am not entirely jazzed about a reading challenge that involves someone else telling you what to read, but who knows, maybe I’ll love it.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Another L. M. Montgomery! This time, it’s Jane of Lantern Hill, which I quite enjoyed: you have a deliciously grim old house in Toronto (delicious for the reader; Jane of course does not enjoy it), you have the gorgeous Prince Edward Island scenery, you have Jane’s Adventures in Housekeeping, which are a lot of fun although admittedly not as memorable as Anne’s liniment cake. But then you can’t have everything.

And you don’t get the same feeling that Montgomery was disgorging the contents of her writing notebooks into Jane of Lantern Hill as in Pat of Silver Bush: the story moves on at a good clip without frequent pauses for “Let me tell you this story about the time someone did something quirky fifty years ago…”

Also Paula McLain’s Love and Ruin, in which Ernest Hemingway is a total manbaby who marries war correspondent Martha Gellhorn because he falls in love with her independence and sense of adventure, and then is baffled - baffled! - that she doesn’t want to settle down and keep the homefires burning while Ernest goes off and has the adventures. What can this mean??? How can she be so selfish? Why does she insist on continuing to display the same character traits she has had for their entire acquaintance when it would be so much more convenient for Ernest if she changed??? WHY ARE YOU LIKE THIS, HEMINGWAY.

This is a rhetorical question because I am pretty sure that people have filled entire tomes on the topic of Hemingway without ever figuring out why he is like this. But honestly. The impression I got in Love and Ruin, at least, is that he wants total unconditional love, when in fact love between adults is almost always conditional AND FOR GOOD REASON, because if you discover your beloved is a Nazi or a serial killer or just Ernest Hemingway, the Man Who Viciously Belittles His Wife to Blow Off Steam, you need an escape hatch.

Side note: I have noticed that the more ferociously someone insists on receiving unconditional love, the more conditional the love they offer generally is. “You have to love me WITHOUT CONDITIONS” is a pretty enormous condition all on its own, honestly.

What I’m Reading Now

Shannon Hale’s Princess Academy. I really enjoyed Hale’s Austenland and felt really meh about all the rest of her books that I’ve read, and Princess Academy is definitely leaning toward the meh category right now.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve finally put a hold on Tamora Pierce’s Tempests and Slaughter. Should I also get Battle Magic, which is the other book of hers that I haven’t read? Oh, but I only ever read the first book of the Terrier series, so maybe I should get those too… Gosh, I’ve really fallen behind, haven’t I?

I've just learned that Tamora Pierce is writing a Numair trilogy. I have... mixed to negative feelings about this.

Unlike the author of the article I never much liked Daine/Numair, so there's nothing for the new trilogy to spoil in that regard. (And I for one would be very interested to see more development of Varice Kingsford!)

But I did like Numair himself a lot, and as I feel that part of what makes him appealing as a character is his mysterious past, I do worry what ripping away all the mystery will do to my feelings about him. And the same with Emperor Mage, which is one of my favorite Tortall books: how is knowing the official version of Numair's past going to shift my understanding of that book?

I tend to read Ozorne's temper tantrum about Numair in Emperor Mage as the reaction of a spurned lover (or would-be lover whose love was unrequited; Numair's feelings about Ozorne never seem as strong as the other way around), and I don't think Pierce is going to go there.

On the other hand, I loooooooved the Carthaki university segments in Emperor Mage, and it looks like the whole first book of the trilogy is going to be devoted to laying that out in loving detail. So that will be great, or at least it could be great - Pierce is not always as good at executing her concepts as coming up with them - and really my biggest oncern about it is that the second and third books in the trilogy might have a hard time living up to it. Do we really need to read all about Numair's years as a street magician?

Also, it will delay the publication of Pierce's other planned magical university book: Tris's studies at Lightbridge. I was looking forward to that, too.

9 – Pairings – For each of the fandoms from day two, what are your three favorite pairings to write?

Oh dear. For most of these fandoms I’ve only written one or two pairings. I guess I’ll just list the favorites that I have for each fandom, and if that ends up being one or three or five, I guess we’ll just go with that.

( The list, with occasional commentary )

fic_corner is open!

fic_corner is open! And I have a story! A story about Lerant of Eldorne!!!

Title: Atonement
Author:

fluffybun
Rating: G
Pairing: none (although I think Lerant has an itty bitty unrequited crush on Kel here)
Summary: Lerant, trying to find his way even though he bears the name of a disgraced House.

This fic shows a number of incidents where his aunt Delia's treason warped his life: the moment when he realized he would never be allowed to fulfill his dream of becoming a knight, his difficulty finding a place in the Tortallan military, and his evolving feelings when Kel becomes Lord Raoul's squire. She's taking his place! But she's so awesome! So awesome. It overcomes his bitterness and by the end he's striving to emulate her hard work and compassion.

In "Atonement" Lerant muses briefly that the only people who could understand his plight are the scions of Tirragen and Malven, which gave me an amusing - and by amusing I mean angsty - idea for a ficlet. Lerant meets one of said scions without knowing it, and they hit it off, only to fly in opposite directions as soon as they learn who the other is because what if the king learned of this meeting and thought they were conspiring?

Oh Jonathan. I suppose I can't really blame him for being paranoid, given that his cousin, his two girlfriends, and one his best friends betrayed him at his coronation. But man, it's gotta be hard on the objects of his distrust.

Amusingly, I also wrote a fic about Lerant...for the very same person who wrote me my fic about Lerant! Great minds think alike. But, proving the adage that no two authors will approach the same prompt the same way, the fic are quite different:

fluffybun takes a more panoramic view, showing the way that his aunt's treason haunts his family, while I focused on one incident in Lerant's life.

Title: One of the King's Own
Author:

osprey_archer
Rating: G
Pairing: none
Summary: Lerant's family history bars him from the Tortallan military - until Lord Raoul offers him a place.

Dear Scribbler:

Hello! Mere words cannot contain my excitement for this exchange. Fanfic about children’s books! If there were chocolate involved, it would contain all of my favorite things in the world.

So basically I am going to be pretty easy to please. I like most things: gen, het, femmeslash, slash, OT3s, ridiculous adventure. Deliciously bittersweet fic is delightful, and so are fluff and rainbows and fun. I don’t really want anything more explicit than PG-13, though, even if the characters are aged up.

Likes
- Characters who understand each other, even if they sometimes drive each other up the wall
- Loyalty, especially characters doing stupidly amazing things out of loyalty for each other
- Characters who are passionate about something (aside from just each other) – who love their work, their art, their stamp-collecting, anything
- Hurt/comfort fics
- Friendship
- Witty banter
- “Five things…” stories

Dislikes
- Character death

( Specifics for the fandoms: The Montmaray Journals, Protector of the Small, Queen's Thief )

The time for trope_bingo is upon us! I am posting my card here, in order to beg for your aid and assistance in brainstorming story ideas!

The one square I am wedded to using is “character in distress,” because that is pretty much perfect for the fic about Lucrezia Borgia’s descent into the catacombs of Rome in order to save her brother Cesare, who is in the clutches of his vampire lover and needs a lot of saving. It will be glorious!

That leaves me with three possible lines to use:

curtainfic	rites of passage / coming of age	au: mundane	soul bonding / soulmates	in vino veritas / drunkfic
amnesia	hurt / comfort	transformations	character in distress	immortality / reincarnation
fuck or die	holidayfic	FREE ★ SPACE	deathfic	bets / wagers
mind games	presumed dead	against all odds	language and translation	trust and vows
au: alternate gender norms	time travel	marriage	metafiction	au: crossover

I am kind of yearning toward the “language and translation” square, because I have a strange and terrible fascination for stories about characters who connect despite the unfortunate fact that they don’t speak the same language and can only communicate nonverbally - like Jamie and Aurelia in Love Actually, or that one couple in the first Call the Midwife episode. Those are the only examples I can think of now.

One would imagine Sutcliff would lend itself to this sort of thing, but actually I think her protags always speak the requisite languages or learn them really fast. (Although IIRC

seascribe had a fun Eagle AU where Esca didn’t know Latin?) I think there’s a reason both the examples I listed come from visual media; this would be really hard to get across in writing, because this would be quite hard to write, I think.

In any case, I feel pretty burnt out on Eagle fic right now. Or, actually, this is not quite true: I have one Eot9 story left that I want to write, a Cottia story during her summer in Aquae Sulis while Marcus and Esca were haring around Caledonia. Cottia has been misbehaving, and Aunt Valaria decides she needs a firm lecturing about How the World Works:

Aunt Valaria: You are Iceni in a Roman world, a woman in a man’s world, and a child in an adult world. You must never tell people what you really want or how you really feel, because to do so is to give away your only weapons: secrecy and charm!
Cottia: I refuse, I refuse, I refuse to believe that this is true (I am secretly afraid it is true), I REFUSE.
Aunt Valaria: How did I fail you, how did I fail?

But I don’t think there’s a trope for that.

Anyway, this is all a moot point, because if I used that vertical line I would have to write metafiction, so probably I should toss it on that account. And possibly I should toss the diagonal too, because of the “au: alternate gender norms,” tag. I don’t know what I would write for that.

Plus, if I did the horizontal with “transformations” I could write the Black Swan story about Nina the wereswan! I don’t know what I would do for amnesia, but I already have a title idea: “Lest We Forget.” And you know titles are always the worst part! (Thoughts who I could give amnesia?)

And for immortality...maybe I could write something about Tortall’s gods? More Tortall fic is always good. And of course hurt/comfort would be perfect to Tortall fic too. Hurt/comfort is generally a perfect prompt for any fandom, but especially for fandoms where characters canonically spend a lot of time getting swords thrust at them.

Fic: A Loyal Man and True
Fandom: Tamora Pierce, Protector of the Small
Pairings: None
Rating: G
Disclaimer: So not mine. :(
Summary: “And in any case, it’s not treason to notice that your sovereign has faults,” Raoul said.

“It is when an Eldorne does it,” Lerant muttered.

***

I'm thinking from now on I might post my fics on AO3 and just post the link here, rather than post the full story both places. Does anyone object? I can keep posting both places if necessary.

A few days ago,

motetus linked to a month-long fic recommendation challenge, Rectober.

“PRETTY BANNER SHINY,” I said. “WANT.”

And so of course I had to do recs.

So here is my first rec!

Title:The Grim Gray Hills
Author:

zodiacal_light
Fandom: Song of the Lioness - Tamora Pierce
Rating: R
Word Count: 2437
Warnings: It’s kind of harrowing.
Summary: All hillmen are traitors, and you always knew this.

Excerpt: This is what it means, to be a noble in the Hill Country: you are a traitor to your people.

Your father or your grandfather was some opportunistic turncoat, who flocked to the Old King's side when he rolled through the region and was hastily ennobled, charged with pacifying their fellow hillmen. Something about rewarding loyalty and local lords knowing their people. The first is a sick northern lie; the second is a tragedy.

Why I loved it: If you pick just one fic to read this month, it should be this one. It’s an exploration of Alex of Tirragen, one of the heroine’s many antagonists, most of whom never get very satisfactory motives in the original. This fic gives Alex motives (and with him, another antagonist, Delia), in a manner so satisfactory and so much deeper than the original as to be instant headcanon.

Alex and Delia come from a recently conquered region, and this fic explores the rage and pain and despair that they feel, and with it, of the imperialist themes in the Tortall books. These are so deeply embedded in the premise that until you start to look for them, you barely see them - but then they’re everywhere.

YOU GUYS, YOU GUYS, I wrote Tortall fic! I have only been in this fandom for...literally half my life. Finally writing fic for it gives me a deep satisfaction.

Fic: Unorthodox Liaisons
Fandom: Protector of the Small - Tamora Pierce
Pairing: Kel/Neal, Neal/Yuki, mentions of various others
Rating: PG
Beta:

carmarthen
Disclaimer: still not mine
Prompt: trope_bingo, in vino veritas/drunkfic
Summary: Kel and Neal confess to Yuki about their drunken Midwinter kiss. But Yuki doesn't react as they expect.

A.k.a: polyamory fic!

Also at AO3: Unorthodox Liaisons

( Unorthodox Liaisons )

Ever since I read The Grim Gray Hills, which I admire and envy, because I want to be able to harrow readers like this - it begins This is what it means, to be a noble in the Hill Country: you are a traitor to your people. - I’ve started twitching every time a Tortall book mentions the Hill Country. I am all “It is the hillfolk, the conquered and oppressed people of the great Tortallan Empire, even more despised than the Bazhir!”

Thanks, guys. This adds an extra layer of skeeviness to certain sections of these books. Like right here:

“A dry summer and a delay in the winter rains in the south bred problems. First the hill folk near Fief Shaila tried to rebel, laying siege to the local army fort. Third Company rode to free the garrison and hunt those responsible. No sooner had Raoul punished the worst troublemakers and gotten pledges of loyalty from the rest than word came from the village of Sweetspring...”

Did you catch that? The hillfolk, who are (we are told at other times) poorer than dirt, are rebelling against their Tortallan conquerors, who keep them that way. And the narrative is all, “Silly troublemakers! Why would they rise up against Tortall’s great empire?” and disposes of their silly rebellion in two sentences. Meanwhile the reader cries, Why were they rising? Was it a bad harvest? Was the local garrison behaving badly? Did they just feel the irrepressible urge for FREEDOM?

And how does Lerant react to this? Lerant is one of my favorite characters in Protector of the Small. I have many favorite PotS characters. Kel! Neal! Yuki! Owen! Wyldon! Um, maybe I should just not bother listing them and just admit that I love everyone in PotS and want all the fic about everyone ever.

But Lerant! Lerant is our go-to man for Hill Country angst. He is a scion of Fief Eldorne, which is in the Hill Country. (How much blood do the Hill nobles share with the Hillfolk generally? It wouldn’t surprise me at all if...Jasson, I believe it was, who conquered the Hill Country?...if Jasson had gotten rid of the old Hill nobles, or most of them, and installed loyal Tortallan knights in their stead.)

Do any of the prisoners accuse him of being a traitor to the Hillfolk? Seriously, Lerant is such a sad puppy. The Tortallans don’t trust him because his aunt Delia was in cahoots with Evil Roger the Evil Usurper (and is now perpetually confined in a tower in the capital, apparently? How’s that working out?), and the Hill Folk either think he’s a traitor to his Hill blood or simply a Tortallan interloper, and either way despise him.

Does Lerant feel a twinge of sympathy for his Hill compatriots, rebels though they are? Or is he so intent on assimilating that he just hates them, because this sort of thing makes it harder for all the good Hill Folk to show that they’re loyal Tortallans? OR BOTH? How many different kinds of cultural angsting can we cram into one fic?

I reread Page over Christmas break, and then didn't post about it because things got busy, and also because it is my favorite book with my favorite Tamora Pierce heroine, so there's not much to write about it except SQUEE!

Hooray for Kel! And her epic hard work (she's always squeezing more time to practice into her ridiculously busy days), and her grim determination to overcome her fear of heights, and her delicious crush on Neal...

I am still sad that Kel and Neal never get together in the later books. The argument seems to be that it would send a bad message to have Kel get together with her first crush, because...presumably there's an epidemic of American schoolgirls who refuse to date anyone who wasn't their very first crush? "We can never be together! I gave my heart to Tony in the fifth grade!"

Yeah, that's not a thing. Marrying one's first crush/first love/high school sweetheart is very much not an ideal. One of the few things that Bella is absolutely right about in the Twilight books is that people are going to be just horrified if she marries her high school sweetheart just out of high school.

I had a friend who got married when she was, let's see, nineteen or twenty? And everyone, but everyone thought this was the worst thing ever. That sort of thing is considered lower-class and stupid and doomed to failure.

So no, the fact that this happens all the time in books is not a sign of a deep-seated American belief that everyone should marry young to their first love. Rather, it reflects the fact that it's narratively very unsatisfying to spend three hundred pages getting invested in a couple of crazy kids and their relationship, only to have the book end "And then they didn't get together! PSYCH! HA, they all married people who aren't even in the book!"

This reflects actual marriage patterns, but for goodness' sake, this is fiction. The mere fact that something is "realistic" doesn't mean that it's a satisfying plot for a novel.

Besides, if you want to write a book about how your first crush is not necessarily going to be your One True Love, probably the heroine's first crush should not be on someone as awesomely snarky as Neal. Couldn't Kel have gotten a hopeless crush on Cleon or Roald, and then grown out of it to realize that Neal was must better suited to her?

People tend to grow out of first crushes because their first crush is on someone unsuitable. If a first crush does happen to alight on someone who would be a good match, then it's silly to say "Well, you should get over it anyway, because after all you first started feeling this way when you were twelve, and obviously that means your feelings don't count. Because...because... twelve-year-olds don't have real feelings! And it's Bad to marry your first crush. Just on general principles!"

I had so much fun with

hc_bingo (and wrote so much fic) that I decided to sign up for trope_bingo, which is pretty much the same idea but with extra weirdness. Coffeeshop AUs! Steampunk AUs! Wingfic! Let's be honest, I am kind of sorry I didn't get a square for wingfic.

And by sorry, I mean that when I saw wingfic was on the list of possible prompts, I started writing a story in which Esca has wings. And Marcus is clipping them, because that is what Romans do with winged slaves. (Apparently feathers are like hair, in that they grow and can be clipped without pain.) Esca is so not happy about this.

But as

sineala pointed out to me, I totally have a free space, which I can use for wingfic! It has therefore become my life goal to make a bingo using that free space.

mistletoe kiss	accidental baby acquisition	de-aged	curtainfic	celebratory kiss
truth or dare	in vino veritas / drunkfic	au: apocalypse	poker/strip poker	game night
kiss to save the day	au: historical	FREE ★ SPACE	animal transformation	secret twin / doppelganger
fuck or die	locked in	au: magic	soul bonding / soulmates	amnesia
fake relationship	sex pollen	cross-dressing	au: were / vamp / supernatural	day at the beach

I am thinking about doing the diagonal starting with "mistletoe kiss" and ending with "day at the beach." I must contemplate whether I have any fandoms where anyone would go to a beach ever. It could involve MERMAIDS.

I already have ideas what to write for "in vino veritas," though. A Tortall fic: one midwinter, Kel & Neal get drunk and kiss and are instantaneously all "WHAT DID WE JUST DO?" and of course they are forced by their massive guilt and honorableness to tell Yuki, and...maybe an OT3 ensues? IDK, Pierce heroines often read very straight to me, although Kel less so than Alanna, who is probably like a Kinsey -2.

I also kind of want to inflict soulbond fic on someone like Jaye Tyler, who would be all "I have a soulmate ugh it's so sappy MAKE IT GO AWAY." But I would have to rewatch Wonderfalls, which I may not have time to do...

On the other hand! The horizontal line starting "kiss to save the day" also looks enticing. It has animal transformations, always my favorite! And historical AUs! Um, although that might require a contemporary fandom that I could transport the characters out of...

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A Certain Slant of Light

otherwise known as Jin's journal

Entries tagged with author: tamora pierce

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