I!!! ALSO!!! HAVE!! SO!!! MANY !!! FEELS!!!
and I’m sort of with you on warrior genders– like, I’m definitely feeling like since “female” and “male” already clearly do not mean anything like the same things they do to humans, it would almost be better to just use entirely other words?? But I know she already was having trouble selling this story, I think doing yet another invented language concept would push it over the line. So it’s probably just easier to use The Gender Binary and then hammer it at every turn to remind the reader that it’s Inverted. In basically every other species you run into in the stories, either there’s no difference, the gender system is complicated enough that it’s just shrugged at, or the males are subservient.
So it’s probably just easier that she uses “male” and “female” and then reminds the reader pretty much constantly that “female” indicates larger, stronger, and more respected– and what’s more, often shows in character interactions that this is true [watch the character arcs of Song, a subordinate young female warrior, and Root, a subordinate young male warrior, through the entire series].
I have a lot of feels about Stone in this book.
And we get so much more of a mature picture of Moon, it’s really rewarding. I’m going to at some point reread the whole series because it’s so amazing to get to watch Moon unfold, and see him develop and mature as a person with a place in a society, and his past trauma is a thing he can draw on instead of a thing that still hurts him. It’s so goddamn rewarding. I’m so glad she got to write this second duology and wrap him up. It’s so amazing to get to have a chance to see what the traumatized beat-up character from the first trilogy gets to really unfold into once he’s gotten over the question of whether or not anyone could ever love him or not, etc. Like, that’s what these two books are: Moon has a family, now what? Well, he gets to find out what that means, and gets to have adventures that don’t hinge around his self-worth. He can just save the world, knowing that he has a place in it when he’s done doing that.
ALSO I don’t know if you’re there yet but the relationship between Malachite and Pearl is so fucking amazing. Two incredibly terrifying and not particularly sympathetic but unambiguously heroic older female characters whose relationship is entirely founded on their mutual terrifyingness? Just– bitches getting shit done!! It’s amazing!!! I won’t go on if you’re not to that part yet!!
I just keep thinking about how Wells said once in an interview or something, that a huge part of fan response to the first book was people telling her she should just kill Pearl off or something, and she was totally shocked by it– but they all seemed to think that Pearl was superfluous, now that Jade was married the mom wasn’t important anymore, and she was like… but… you can… have more than one female character… and if there’s ever been a character who was clearly not just The Mom, it’s Pearl???
You’re not supposed to like her, but it was so clear through that whole first trilogy that Pearl is such a grief-scarred creature, explicitly suffering from depression, isolated by power– of course you’re not reading her from a perspective where you’re going to sympathize with her, and there’s not really any perspective where you’re going to be sympathetic to a creature that powerful and bitter– well, it’s not like we get a more sympathetic look in this series either, but we do get a look at all, and it’s so fascinating and rewarding. Terrifying Zero-Bullshit I-Defeated-Crippling-Depression-By-Murdering-It-With-My-Fearsome-Teeth Death Mom with her beautiful new princess-husband who gets to save the day by having good social graces. It’s definitely something to roll around in.
I also love how Moon’s sister Celadon is like, this bizarrely anomalous Extremely Sensible And Polite Person. Like, where the fuck did she come from? She’s the Normalest Normie Normal Person to ever Normal, and it’s goddamn brilliant because she’s surrounded by psychopaths and just sort of inured to it. She’s so important, because otherwise you might not realize just how batshit terrifying Malachite in particular is. And like, you can see that Jade has clearly been struggling her whole life toward the Celadon-like normal ideal, and you also can clearly see that she has never and will never attain it. And it’s not like Celadon’s a jerk about it, she’s just really sensible and normal, and doesn’t hold it against anybody. It doesn’t keep her from doing what needs to be done, she just always reacts with horror to things that should be horrifying but given how fucking insane most of the events in these books are, have become kind of commonplace. It’s a very important perspective.
I badly wanted Kethel to have a name. I was so fascinated by him, and by First and Consolation, and I want their stories, all of them. Consolation was such a fucking phenomenal 180 from the first book’s Ranea, and on the one hand I wish there were more consistency, but on the other hand, I get that clearly, making hybrids is such a complicated and unpredictable thing– but now it makes me wonder, the mentor-dakti from the first book, and even Ranea, could they have been sympathetic from another perspective? I love how bad at being good Consolation is, and how she doesn’t know how to express emotions or feel things properly, but she’s trying and she’s so goddamn sincere and she want so badly to be good. And making Kethel not be a crossbreed at all, it just puts it right out there that there’s nothing biologically good or evil about Fell, it’s all cultural or lack-of-cultural. He’s just like Consolation, he’s so bad at being good but so goddamn earnest about it. I really like that whole overarching theme of good and evil not actually being biologically determined.
Like, the biological determinism aspect in this whole thing has always been something I’m a liiiiittle bit uncomfortable with; your whole societal role being determined by how you’re born, including apparently how smart you are and how seriously people take you and so on– she’s made gestures toward softening it, and having Bramble explain how Arbora do actually choose their jobs and can switch them around, and in a previous book she made a nod toward homosexual tendencies among the fertile Aeriat being a thing that was understood and sort of dealt with, sex for fun and sex for breeding being functionally different things– but going beyond that and making explicit that on a deeper level, races are not inherently good or evil was a welcome point for the series to finally clearly make.
…
Also, a minor detail I’m enamored with in this last book is that people get their faces bitten off a lot more than in previous books, and I sort of knew that Raksura had large jaws before but literally in this one Moon sort of unfolds his jaw to bite an enemy’s face off, and Malachite does the same at a different spot in the book, and that’s a detail that has not previously occurred and I am absolutely in love with?
(via csevet)
