beroli | Entries tagged with sporking

( Content note: Sexual assault, bullying )

Current Mood: amused

Content note: Sexual trauma mention, rape mention

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Current Mood: accomplished

And another two months passed, so I'm going to just summarize the bit I'm having a hard time figuring out what to say about, and hopefully I'll be able to get back to regular posting after that.

( Content note: extreme whorephobia, torture, sexual assault, rape )

Current Mood: nauseated

Sorry about the two-month delay there. I think you'll see why this was delayed when I finish the post.

Content note: whorephobia, sexual assault, rape, child rape, torture

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Current Mood: nauseated

Chapter Two finds Saetan, still our viewpoint character, but in Terreille, not Hell.

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Current Mood: aggravated

Content note: Creepiness, pedophilia.

( Time for a more thorough introduction of Jaenelle. )

Current Mood: busy

Content note: Child murder, general bullying.

You'll likely notice a change of name scheme. The chapters themselves continue to not have names; the name of the blog entry is a comment by me.

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Current Mood: cold

Now the viewpoint shifts to Daemon.

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Current Mood: accomplished

Yes, the chapters are subdivided into numbered parts.

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Current Mood: amused

I am Tersa the Weaver, Tersa the Liar, Tersa the Fool.

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Current Mood: accomplished

This is the order in which I plan to spork the series. May change later.

Daughter of the Blood
Heir to the Shadows
Queen of the Darkness
Weaver of Dreams
The Prince of Ebon Rih
Zuulaman
Kaeleer's Heart
Tangled Webs
Winsol Gifts
Family
The High Lord's Daughter
Shades of Honor
The Invisible Ring
The Shadow Queen
Shalador's Lady

This order is neither chronological nor in publication order. It may seem odd and random. To some extent it is odd and random. While I may surprise myself (I didn't expect to have so much to say about the dramatis personae), I expect to do the most ranting about Shades of Honor and Shalador's Lady, which is why I put the trilogy that ends with Shalador's Lady last and Shades of Honor right before that trilogy starts (pulling it out of the middle of the book of short stories it's in).

I think that's as much stalling as I can do before I start going through the actual books; I'm sure anyone reading this is excited over the prospect.

Current Mood: determined

Content note: References to rape and torture

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Current Mood: sarcastic

     A Queen's Court can consist of up to thirteen circles. The First Circle must include twelve (Jeweled?) Blood males, one of whom is Master of the Guard, one of whom is Steward, and another of whom is either Consort or First Escort. That's all that's required; a Queen will have a Healer unless something is terribly wrong, and can stuff her First Circle with as many women and extra men as she pleases and have whoever she likes in the other Circles. Theoretically, she could maintain a minimal court with only twelve men in the First Circle and no further circles, but no competent Queen would try to do that. This is not as overtly sexist (there's still a ton of sexism there, which I'll get into as I go through the books) as it looks at first glance because of the nature of Blood instincts: Blood males need to serve. A Blood male who cannot find a Queen who is not a monster will willingly and knowingly kneel in front of a monster, sobbing and knowing that he'll probably be tortured later for not managing to look happy about it, by preference to serving no Queen at all.

     Blood who are not Queens--both male and female--serve Queens; a court that doesn't have (for example) a Healer is crippled. (I don't actually know if Priestesses serve in Courts or not; Black Widows do.) Typically, a Court will have far more than twelve male and far more than twelve female members. The fact that a legitimate Court requires twelve Blood males is largely a point of nearly-irrelevant Protocol: if there's a Queen trying to set up a Court, she'll have more applicants than she knows what to do with, unless something is seriously wrong. A Queen would need to be someone Bishop was trying to subject to a plausibility-straining humiliation conga for her Court to break because only one man and no women would serve her. Not that I mean to foreshadow anything, or anything.

     The number of ruling Queens is, for obvious reasons, limited by the territory available to be ruled. Each of the three Realms is made up of Territories, and each Territory is made up of Provinces. A Queen can serve in another Queen's court; a Province Queen serves that territory's Territory Queen, the Queen who rules a small village in a Province serves the Province Queen, or a Queen may serve a term of service in another Queen's court ruling nothing as training, but a Queen who never aspired to rule anything would be widely--and by the author--seen as defective. The Queen can dismiss anyone from her court--or have them summarily killed, for that matter--at any time.

     It's obvious at a glance that there is no room for any form of transexuality or intersexuality in the extreme, total gender essentialism that underlies Bishop's magic system. Everyone is born with a penis or a vulva. Either comes with its own set of completely irresistible, undeniable instincts. End of chapter, end of book.

     There are people who are attracted to their own sexes, or are asexual, in her world. This changes nothing magical: a lesbian Queen still needs a court that has twelve Blood males. For that Queen, it's as simple as always having a First Escort rather than a Consort; a Blood male who isn't attracted to women, on the other hand, will still feel the irresistible urge to serve in a Court, and may be ordered to perform sexual services for that Court's women while there. (Obviously, no good Queen would do this, but there are a lot of bad Queens.)

     Even though women rule (except in one or two cases which I'll get into later...and yes, they are important), her world is thoroughly sexist. I'll get into the most extreme examples of sexism in...let me count...probably six novels and at least one book of short stories from now. (It's ironic that the things I most want to rant about are at the far end of the series, but the contrast is necessary.) Some I'll get to right away.

     Because of a reaction I got to this, let me say one thing in the clearest possible terms: If you ever thought I was saying or implying that I thought the books depict a functional society, you were mistaken.

Current Mood: pensive

     The races of the Black Jewels universe include:

     Hayllians. One of the three "long-lived" races, which means they have the same life expectancy as Eyriens and Dhemlans, a life expectancy measured in millennia. The villains, Hekatah and Dorothea, are Hayllians. They're Always Evil in the Dungeons and Dragons "doesn't actually mean always" sense. Nonmagical social status largely takes precedence over Jewel rank and caste among them, which is a big part of why they're evil. (The trick to understanding Bishop's attitude toward social status is that there are three components of your birth if you're Blood: which caste you were born into, which is valid, which Jewel you wear, which is valid, and who your parents are, which is not valid. If you consider yourself more important than everyone who wears a lighter Jewel, the narrative voice will never frown at you--though it will expect you to take care of your servants. If you think you have a right to rule because you were born a Queen, guess what--you're right and thinking exactly what you should think. If you think it matters that your parents are married aristocrats and that other person's mother is a prostitute and no one knows who his father is, you're a villain and you're going down, probably to be graphically tortured onstage.)

     Eyriens. The second of the three "long-lived" races. They're people with wings. They're Always Evil in a way that gets more detail than the way Hayllians are (I'll go into lots more detail of this when going through the books...promise). It is morally wrong for a non-Eyrien to observe that Eyriens are Always Evil, unless the observer is a protagonist.

     Dhemlans. The third of the three "long-lived" races. Physically they resemble Hayllians, who happen to resemble wingless Eyriens. I can read all the books and yet all I really know about them is that they needed to be protected from being conquered by the Hayllians.

     The human short-lived races. Rihlanders, Glacians, and so on. They live about as long as real-world humans do, and die in an eyeblink from the perspective of one of the long-lived races.

     The kindred. All sorts of animals live in the Black Jewels world: horses, wolves, great cats, dogs, and so on. The fact that dogs only exist because of human manipulation in the real world--well, Bishop never addresses whether dogs in her world, including Scelties, were created by humans. For the most part, the animals are no more or less intelligent than their real-world equivalents, but as the human races have Blood members who have magic, the animals have Blood members, called "kindred" by the human Blood, who have both magic and sapience.

     Centaurs, satyrs, unicorns--I'm not sure whether unicorns should go here, or with the general animals. No unicorns who are not kindred are ever introduced, to my memory. Arachnians, the large poisonous kindred spiders who excel at the magic called dream-weaving that lets Black Widows foretell the future.

Next time, the structure of a Queen's court. Then, more of Bishop deliberately going against people's assumptions, as I give a dramatis personae, starting with Prince Saetan Daemon SaDiablo.

Current Mood: amused

I was going to do one post on the full two-page glossary printed at the front of each Black Jewels book, whether novel or anthology, but partway through writing it I realized that, with my commentary, it was getting pretty long. Accordingly, this post is just on the first page of the glossary, the one that lists the Jewel ranks.

Jewels

White
Yellow
Tiger Eye
Rose
Summer-sky
Purple Dusk
Opal*
Green
Sapphire
Red
Gray
Ebon-gray
Black

*Opal is the dividing line between lighter and darker Jewels because it can be either.

When making the Offering to the Darkness, a person can descend a maximum of three ranks from his/her Birthright Jewel.

Example: Birthright White could descend to Rose.

The Blood are people born with magical abilities. They rule over those who lack magical powers, who are called "landens." Treating landens as people, versus treating them as toys, is an obvious marker for whether a character is good or evil. Importantly, magic is carried in the blood; no major character has landen relatives (I'll revisit this in more detail when I reach Tangled Webs, at least three books from now), and the Blood and landens live completely separate lives. Even Blood servants use magic casually and habitually.

There are no named Blood characters who don't wear Jewels, except the villain of Tangled Webs. As the name of the initial trilogy implies, Bishop's focus is overwhelmingly at the more powerful end of the spectrum. Oh--that's something I hadn't spelled out: A darker-colored Jewel means more magical power, though there's a range of power within each Jewel. At the time when the books start (I know, that phrasing's a big giveaway, but what it's giving away is something you learn right off), the darkest Jewel anyone has ever gotten at the Birthright Ceremony as a child has been the Red. If you have Birthright Red, you might receive the Black Jewel as your adult Jewel, your "Jewel of rank." You also might receive a Red Jewel marginally more powerful than your Birthright Jewel. The only time in the books where someone doesn't improve their Jewel rank by at least one color at adulthood, he's been severely traumatized and emotionally stunted, the thought of being an adult or having more magical power scares him, and it's explicitly called out in the text that he could have gotten a far more powerful Jewel were those things not the case, but some adults do wear the White Jewel without any sign of any kind of mental vulnerability: some people simply don't have that much magical power, theoretically.

Where do the Jewels come from, at the Birthright Ceremony or at adulthood? That's less than clear, but the Jewels come from some combination of dragons and "the Darkness," a mysterious force which characters in these books seem to worship even while not expecting it to actively assist or impede them, whatever they do.

Nothing story-internal makes a darker-Jeweled character morally superior to a lighter-Jeweled, or Jewelless, one. That said, the most powerful Jewel Bishop gives to a villain, ever, is the Red as Jewel of rank, while for the initial trilogy, the good viewpoint characters wear:

the Gray

the Gray again

the Ebon-gray

the Black

the Black again

And then there's a character whom Bishop systematically excludes the reader from the mind of, but whose moral standing is as far beyond questioning as Aslan's in the Narnia books. She wears Black as a Birthright Jewel, and her Jewel of rank is a never-seen-before color they call Ebony.

The next post will cover the other half of the glossary, and detail the other types of rank that exist in Blood society--and the implications of the fact that there are multiple human races but only one "Blood society."

Current Mood: annoyed

     So I opened up the omnibus edition of the Black Jewels trilogy, and what do you know, there's the article I remembered reading before.

     Text follows. If it's in bold, it's Anne Bishop; if it's not, it's me.

     What can I say about a story that has been a part of my life for more than a decade? What can I say about characters who became people I cared about--and still do? Perhaps the best thing is to answer the question I'm most often asked: "How did you come up with this story and these characters?"

     The answer is both complex and simple. I asked, what if?

     What if a culture was based on the dark side of fantasy? What kind of morality would it have? What kind of code of honor? What protocols would develop to protect the weaker from the stronger? What if it was a culture that was elegant in its darkness and had tenderness as well as temper, passion as well as violence? What if the males were aggressive, intelligent, passionate, sensual--warriors with a veneer of the civilized? What if the female was the dominant gender and the males served, so that the Nurturer controlled the Warrior? What if some of the social and sexual mores that had applied to females in our world were applied to the males in this world? How would they act? How would they live? Who would they be?

     From these wonderings, among others, a three-layered place called the Realms and a people called the Blood slowly emerged. For a while, I was content with making up scenarios and playing them out in my head to see how the characters that were taking shape reacted to different situations. I had fun developing the different races--the unicorns and the rest of the kindred, the Dea al Mon, the Eyriens and others. I had fun with the characters--Daemon, with his cold elegance and his passion for Jaenelle; Lucivar, with his earthy approach to life and those glorious wings, Ladvarian, who was the first of the kindred to appear; and Jaenelle, with her immense power and emotional scars.

     Then, one day, came another what if?: If the survival of the Blood's culture depends on dancing on the knife edge of trust, what happens if it goes wrong?

     I didn't have an answer, so I continued to play with the puzzle pieces of this world--until the High Lord showed up one day, a man with power that was feared, a past that held regrets, and the hard-won wisdom that comes from experience. Suddenly all the pieces clicked into place. I had a father and two estranged sons whose lives were tangled with two greedy, ambitious High Priestesses. I had a world gone wrong and a culture spiraling toward destruction. And I had a dream that, when made flesh, changed the lives of those three men and, by doing so, changed everything.

     I had a story about love and betrayal, magic and mystery, honor and passion...and the price that is paid for a dream. I had the story you now hold in your hands.

     Enter the world of the Blood.

     Welcome to The Black Jewels Trilogy.

     Hm. I remembered--it's kind of hard to forget--the magical gender essentialism that the Blood cultures turn on, but I didn't remember the more prosaic gender essentialism in her too-bedrock-to-acknowledge association of female with "the Nurturer," even as she talks about playing around with gender tropes. It's not inaccurate to say that Jaenelle changed everything--well, it is and it isn't, which I'll go into later--and it's inarguably accurate to say that she changed the lives of the three other characters Bishop names, but insofar as she did change everything, did she do so by changing the lives of those characters? I don't think so, but, again, I'll go into that later. When I've gotten far enough to expect a reader of this blog who hasn't read the books to recognize the names.

     That was the introduction. Next time, I'll lay out the magical and cultural ground rules for the series. Oh, I'm calling it a "series" rather than a "trilogy" because, from the vantage point from which I'm writing this, there are seven novels, and two books of short stories. The omnibus edition I'm working with here comprises the initial trilogy, but I'm not planning on stopping when I come to the end of it.

Current Mood: contemplative

I'm going to begin a critical deconstruction/sporking of Anne Bishop's Black Jewels series. I'm going to try to be scrupulously fair; if you think I've read something wrong, by all means, tell me. I reserve the right to disagree (and to tell you to drop it, or take it to your own journal, if it gets to being pointless back-and-forth).

If I don't have something specific to say about a chapter, I'll summarize it, so that people who haven't read the books will still be able to follow along with the narrative.