Black Jewels: Rules for Breaking

[beroli]

Content note: Creepiness, pedophilia.
 

The next chapter section immediately establishes that Saetan is furious with "that impudent little demon," Char, about something. Then Saetan spells out that while Char is back, it's five days later, not "tomorrow." Char looks afraid of Saetan, but then he looks toward the doorway and "a strange blend of tenderness, eagerness, and resignation swept over his face." A seven-year-old blonde blue-eyed girl comes in and starts looking at the paintings while Saetan boggles that the creator of the illusion is alive rather than demon-dead, significantly younger than he expected someone who could make the illusions to be, and the expression in her eyes was sweet and disappointingly dull-witted. And what was a living child doing in Hell?

Then she turned and looked at him. As he watched the summer-sky blue eyes change to sapphire, the surf swept him away.

Ancient eyes. Maelstrom eyes. Haunted, knowing, seeing eyes.

Following introductions, Saetan tells Char "You may go." Char protests, but Jaenelle touches his arm. No words were spoken, and he couldn't feel a psychic thread. Whatever passed between the two children was very subtle, and there was no question who ruled. Char bowed politely and left the room, closing the door behind him.

And thus does Char leave the story--no, not quite; he'll show up a little in the next book, but even less than he did in this one. But Bishop is clearly using him to try to show certain things, and she's actually showing different things. I'm supposed to be thinking Jaenelle's rulership ability is incredible; instead I'm thinking Saetan's is incredibly bad. Jaenelle isn't using some kind of magical mind control to compel obedience. Char looks at her with tenderness and resignation, not reverence. If she's less scary than Saetan, it's because she chooses to be; she is already (as I'll get to shortly) far more powerful than him magically. I have no doubt that Bishop means for Char's immediate obedience to be because Jaenelle's Just That Awesome, but what's being shown is simply that she doesn't automatically threaten horrible consequences for disobedience as her first, last, and only answer to why anyone would obey her.

I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the description of "tenderness and resignation" as the attitude from a Blood male toward a Blood female he serves, but Jaenelle is still a child and Char's resignation could be that he can't stop her from primarily dismissing him from her life in favor of Saetan, and it will be a lot more clear-cut later just how drenched in benevolent sexism the Blood male version of "service" is, so I'll save that discussion for then.

Jaenelle asks if Saetan will teach her Craft, saying "Cassandra said you might if I asked." Hiding his very strong reaction to her mentioning Cassandra, Saetan says casually that he doesn't see why not and asks where Cassandra is staying now, saying "We've lost touch over the years." Then Saetan tells her to "come here" and touches her cheek; when he senses a sudden pulse of anger from her, he holds her eyes, letting his fingers travel slowly along her jaw and brush against her lips, all the way around and back. He didn't try to hide his curiosity, interest, or the tenderness he felt for most females.

Okay, maybe we are going to discuss the benevolent sexism now--no, I think we're going to discuss creepiness instead. As in holy shit, Saetan, the reasons for people to be afraid of you which are entirely under your control and your fault are mounting as a horrendous rate.

Saetan couldn't stop wondering why being touched made her so angry. So, apparently, this is supposed to be clearly an unusual reaction for Jaenelle to have, something that demands justification. It'll get tons of completely-unrelated-to-Saetan justification later, but right now, I'm shaking my head that Bishop's apparent default assumptions have adult men touching seven-year-old girls in the way she just described Saetan touching Jaenelle, and no one seeing anything to object to in this. Saetan didn't even ask her if it was okay to touch her, he just told her to "come here" and then touched her, reflecting vapidly to himself, huh, this seems to be making her angry, I wonder why. I remembered Saetan being creepy, but the parts I'd expected to establish this are going to be downright anticlimactic after this. (Oh well. I'm sure, when I get to them, something will jump out at me that will catapult them to the same level of creepiness as this. I c-c-can hardly wait.) Even if I didn't know exactly what this is supposed to be hinting at, I wouldn't be looking at the hint, I'd be wondering how many girls who were far less able to defend themselves (and this is literally the first person he's met since he made the Offering to the Darkness and received his Black Jewel who could defend herself from him, not that he even knows yet that she could) Saetan has creeped on over the millennia.

Saetan offers Jaenelle two promises--to teach her all the Craft he knows, and never to lie to her--and says he wants one in return, that she'll tell him about any Craft lessons she learns from other sources. She agrees. There's some creepiness in the next passage, but that creepiness is entirely redundant with what's just happened, so I'll gloss over it; the important thing is that Saetan's initial surprise when his psychic probe doesn't find Birthright Red (the darkest color a Birthright Jewel has been in the history of the Blood, also the Jewel color he expects for a child who's going to grow up and wear the Black as Witch) is quickly overwhelmed by astonishment when he instead finds Birthright Black.

My initial thought was that Bishop is presenting a gradual development toward more magical power: the earliest magic-users were witches and Warlords who wore White and Yellow Jewels, Saetan was one of a handful of the Blood to have Birthright Red and the very first male to have Black as his Jewel of rank, and eventually there will be Birthright Gray, Birthright Ebon-gray, and Black as a Birthright Jewel for people who aren't living myths. That's still possible. But I have no faith in her not writing rules just so that it will show how kewl her character is when she breaks them, and, correspondingly, it may well be that no one but Witch will ever have a Birthright Jewel darker than the Red in her world's cosmology.

Jaenelle shows Saetan her Jewels: 25 Jewels total, 13 Black Jewels and one of each of the other colors, which, she says, she got from Lorn. That was a name from the Blood's most ancient legends. Lorn was the last Prince of the Dragons, the founding race who had created the Blood. After establishing that Lorn asked her not to say where or how she met him, Saetan offers her her first lesson in basic Craft, and discovers that while she can't move a paperweight back and forth across a table trying can move the entire building they're in back and forth, and while she can't summon her shoe from across the room trying can summon every other leather object in the room (nearly getting Saetan crushed by two chairs). Then Jaenelle insists Saetan drink some of her blood, in a scene which is distinctly creepy itself, and leaves. Andulvar comes in and Saetan tells him the butterfly maker is "a living child, a Queen, and she's Witch."

Andulvar's jaw dropped. "Witch? Like Cassandra was Witch?"

Saetan choked back a snarl. "Not like Cassandra but, yes, Witch."

This is worth noting because of Saetan's apparent extreme hostility to Cassandra. After my next post, anyone reading this will have as much information as I do about why Saetan's reacting this way to Cassandra now; I hope someone can explain it to me.

Comments

[lliira]

So the only non-evil female is prepubescent. And an adult male immediately paws at her, thinking how great she is. Then she seduces him, i.e. gets him to drink her blood.

WHAT THE EVERLOVING HELL

[beroli]

Oh, I left out how contrived her pushing him to drink her blood is, because there wasn't a good way to put it in; apparently she knows what a Guardian is and recognizes one on sight, but the books will never explain why.

(Maybe Char told her. Or she thinks he's a demon and knows demons drink blood. But since Bishop doesn't hesitate to infodump about much less ambiguous things, I find myself thinking she didn't really care whether it was something Jaenelle would do at that point; she wanted to write it, so she did.)

[(Anonymous)]

ugh I hate waxing about eyes, whether it's being able to see the precise exact shade changing to some other precise exact shade or how you can see how haunted and wise and whatever they are THEY'RE FUCKING EYES OK

"letting his fingers travel slowly along her jaw and brush against her lips, all the way around and back"

NO NO NO

Also heroes who are important/good/powerful just because of things they were born with and/or automatically have are boring to me. Not that this can't be done well like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the X-Men, but many writers rely too much on what powers a person is simply GIVEN versus what they do with them, let alone ever, god forbid, earning them instead.

Also it is ever explained how she just...showed up in Hell? Presumably she used that power she has of sort of teleporting, iirc, but like...they don't know that, do they?

- RF, a-sporking-rat

[lliira]

Heh, I actually really like eye stuff if it's appropriate and done well. But there's a way to do it well and a way to do it badly, and it's so often done badly in SF/F. I'd like to force some of these writers to read some romance novels, where the quality expected for things like this is FAR higher.

I've been thinking about classism a LOT lately (reading lots of romance novels will do that), and how it relates to the "just born with it" stuff that's prevalent in speculative fiction. Vampires are made, not born, and yet there's all this pro-aristocracy goop running through so much contemporary vampire fiction. And then of course there's Bishop's more traditional take. The idea that the best people to rule are those who are born to the ruling family is at least as old as written history, but religion is central to that concept. And it's sadly rare for culture in contemporary fantasy to have ANY religion that holds together, let alone one with a divine right or Great Chain of Being. Which makes it look like these writers are exalting wealth, status, and power for their own sake, and think that a society based on nothing but that would be great, when it wouldn't work for a second.

[(Anonymous)]

What's ironic about the aristo-fetishization in modern vampire works is that the vampire nobles from the novels that formed the genre (Ruthven, Carmilla, Dracula) were nobles not because it was a good and sexy thing, but because nobles are creepy and bad and we're rooting for our "upper/middle class but in a well-off everyman way" heroes against them, fuck those guys. If I understand the cultural context of the novels right, anyway.

[lliira]

Yeah, that's how I understood them too. Violent parasites with extremely pale skin because they never have to do a day's work in their lives -- it's the same propaganda that was used against the aristocracy. And tbh, as someone who despises aristocracy, I wish we'd get back to that. (Without "extremely pale skin" as a mark of evil, because I have extremely pale skin myself, and also the world has changed and paleness no longer signals wealth, not that it ever *really* did. I'm grossed out by how it denotes beauty in vampire novels, though.) With heroes who aren't just middle class, of course. I want to see homeless people take out vampires too.

[beroli]

It will be explained.

Of course, logically it stands out like a sore thumb that that wasn't one of the first questions Saetan asked. He'll wonder, and he'll be astounded at the answer, just not yet, because Bishop wanted that chapter's big revelation to be Birthright Black, not that particular one of the things Jaenelle does with it.