A Fan's Playground

Huh. I'm not quite sure what I was expecting from this novella, except that I expected it to be something I wasn't expecting bc it's Tamsyn Muir of Locked Tomb fame, but it still isn't quite what I was expecting!

Anyway it's a story about the fairy tale trope of a princess who's locked in a tower by a witch, and her efforts to be freed.

It's also about the. relationship???? between Floralinda (the princess) and Cobweb (a fairy, who hates her and also helps her). and about growth and change and potential and becoming a different kind of person.

It's odd and surprisingly emotionally affecting and I was very into it.

I decided to read Dungeon Meshi because I kept seeing people on tumblr posting about the new anime adaptation, and it looked fun and cute. And although I don't watch much tv, there was an entire manga I could read instead! So I did.

The basic premise: in a world where adventuring parties going on dungeon crawls is a thing that happens, one guy has a dream: to be able to cook and eat all the different kinds of monsters in the dungeon, to be able to find out how they taste!

And because his party needs to be able to head deep into the dungeon to rescue a party member who was left behind, and they don't have the funds or the time to collect supplies, all of a sudden they have REASON to need to eat monsters. They're going to forage and hunt for all their meals as they make their way down.

So using that as the basis, the manga goes on to explore the worldbuilding, the interrelationships of the characters in the party, everyone's backstories and reasons for being there, a developing plot, and of course, the ingredients and nutritional composition and flavour of every meal they eat.

I absolutely adored every bit of this!!! The main characters are all a delight, and it's the kind of story where the author sees and shows you the inherent personness of all characters, including antagonists. And the world created to make sense of the dungeon's existence is fascinating, as are all the ways the ecosystems within the dungeon are expanded upon to make sense of the creatures living within it.

And it's a story that knows what its themes are, too, and is able to tie them all together in extremely satisfying ways in the climax of the narrative!

I had this moment leading up towards the ending where I was like:

cut for thematic spoilers I guess

ohhhh it's about....everyone being part of a balanced ecosystem of life and death where everything sustains everything else! the various human species included! and I was filled through my very soul with this feeling of connectedness myself.

Anyway it was amazing and I had a lot of feels.

And as well as enjoying all of that, I also just really loved our main characters! We start out seeing them all fairly shallowly but over the course of the story as more aspects of them are revealed they're all just.....I love every one of them.

I did struggle with a few aspects of the manga, but none of it significantly affected my ability to enjoy the read:

1. It kept adding more and more characters, and I got rather lost occasionally trying to keep track of them all. But ultimately it's not vital to remember every tertiary character to get a good read out of this, so it's not as bad as it could be.

2. In the mid to later parts, it became a lot more plot focused and actiony than I'd really been expecting, in a way that made it harder for me to follow, since fight scenes in sequential art are challenging for me. And occasionally it drew back more than I wanted from its focus on food. But it refocused eventually!

3. It turned out to be pro monarchy in the end, which isn't my fave, but it's not like a major theme of the manga or anything so I could overlook it.

4. I kept expecting it to have at least a little bit of textual queerness, and there wasn't any as far as I could see! Even various background relationships or depictions of people's attraction was m/f. But uh. Falin/Marcille, anyone? There are some powerful vibes there. (I'll also accept Laios/Kabru)

In conclusion, I highly recommend it, and if you want to read it, you can read the whole thing online for free in English translation here: https://dungeonmeshi.com/manga/dungeon-meshi-chapter-1/

Lud-in-the-Mist is a fantasy novel published in the 1920's, well before the modern genre of fantasy was really established. It's so interesting to read a fantasy novel from that time before Tolkien dropped like a meteor into the genre landscape, affecting everything from thereafter; everything post-tolkien was either written with inspiration from Tolkien, or in reaction against how much everything was written with inspiration from Tolkien, I feel like. But this one is doing its own thing, but in a way that feels to me maturely developed, as if it came out of a long tradition of fantasy novels just like it, even though it definitely didn't.

I've previously heard Lud-in-the-Mist being praised as a perfect gem of a novel, but although I enjoyed it, I would definitely not go that far. I've also heard it be called things like sweet, and lovely, which led me to certain expectations of the tone of the book which ended up to be rather inaccurate!

The novel takes place in a prosaic town in a vaguely British-feeling secondary world, in the country of Dorimare. The town is close, however, to a boundary with Faerie, and fairy fruit keeps getting smuggled in, with great effect on those who eat of it. The book opens slowly, with an exploration of the setting and context of the story, which I found very interesting, but eventually the major characters and plot are introduced. The long and short of it is: how to keep the fairy influence out of their town?

The book is very good at setting and place and atmosphere, at creating a sense of the liminal space between Faerie and Dorimare. The characters all feel fairly realistic and believable also. But I just couldn't bring myself to care much about most of the major characters, which was a real problem! They're mostly fairly unpleasant people, but I don't think that's what was keeping me at a distance. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, which I think is a book very much in the tradition of Lud-in-the-Mist, is also a novel about a collection of mostly-unpleasant characters, but I find all of them compelling. I'm not sure what JS&MN is doing differently on it than LitM!

Anyway I'm glad I read it, and I would love to read more books like it...but preferably with characters I like better lol.

I started my reread of Heaven Official's Blessing in September and have been working my way steadily through it ever since. This time I posted my as-it-happened thoughts to mastodon as I went, because there's just SO much book in this book that there's no way I'd remember everything by the end! So now I'm copying all those thoughts over to here for posterity. Warning, this is like 22,000 words of thoughts. But this book is so GOOD it's worth every one of those words and so many more besides! I could talk about this book forever it feels like.

Anyway. On with the liveblog! (originally posted to: https://federatedfandom.net/@soph_sol/tagged/tgcfthoughts)

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THE END.

This is the latest T Kingfisher dark fairy tale retelling, and like, if you've read these by her before then you know the kind of thing you're getting into. And I have, and I do, and as always I am here for it.

I don't have a great deal to say about this one, but in this particular case the T Kingfisher trademarked "practical heroine who does the hard thing that needs to be done" is also a bit of a wet blanket. I love her.

Also,

click here for some spoilers

I love that in the end Toadling doesn't actually have to decide between exploring her connection with Halim and returning to the love and acceptance of her greenteeth monster family, because she's going to outlive him by centuries, so she can go hang out with him while he's alive and then go home again after.

When I watched The Untamed (hereafter CQL) in 2021, my immediate thought upon finishing was that I HAD to read the book (hereafter MDZS) that it was based on. Now, more than two years later, I have finally done that.

And it's so good you guys!

And also, really very different from CQL.

I knew that already, because on top of the way that inevitably at least some things get changed in any adaptation process, I understand that the complex system of chinese censorship has standards for a wide variety of different things not being allowed to be shown on tv. And several of those things are integral to the version of the story in MDZS.

Being now familiar with the versions of the story told in both tv and book, I think the difference that's the biggest is the moral universe being presented by the themes of each story. CQL is the story of a person who always tries his best to do what's right, and is treated poorly by society because of it, but eventually is able to triumph. MDZS is the story of a person who makes some huge mistakes and then has to (gets to?) learn how to live with them.

Both are wonderful stories worth telling! And they have a lot in common. But they are not, in the end, the same story. Going forward I will definitely be paying more attention to which version is being tagged as the fandom when I open fic!

I do feel like I'm not quite up to writing a coherent review of the book right now though. I read the first two-thirds or so back in April, and then accidentally took a multi-month break from reading it, and then read through the remainder over the course of the last few weeks. So the beginning portions of the book are fuzzy in my head and easy to confuse with everything else I have read about CQL/MDZS and the fanfic of both, and it's hard to hold the shape of the entire narrative in my head.

But I do have a few more notes! Most of which are varyingly spoilery for either or both of CQL & MDZS

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idk I feel like I'm spending most of this review talking about MDZS only as relates to CQL which feels a bit unfair to MDZS as the originator, like I'm not respecting it as its own thing! But it's hard for me to talk about it in any other way after having spent the last two years so much in the fandom. If I'd come to MDZS before I ever knew anything about CQL this would be reading very differently!

At some point I do want to do a closer reading of MDZS to appreciate it better for what it specifically is doing, like the way I'm currently doing a TGCF close read on mastodon. There's so much fruitful stuff to pay attention to in any work by MXTX.

Anyway please rec me fic that is particularly good at being based in MDZS canon! I want to spend more time exploring it!

I mad the fatal mistake of not writing down my initial impressions immediately upon finishing the book, so this review must rely on my inconsistent memory. Can I remember the things that struck me that are worth talking about?! Tune in to the rest of this post to find out.

To Shape a Dragon's Breath is a wonderful alternate-earth historical fantasy novel, with a main character from a culture based on post-colonial Indigenous people in North America. In this context of trying to maintain their way of life despite the devastations of disease and colonial rule, Anequs is a teen who finds a dragon egg and bonds with the new-hatched dragon. By the rules of the colonial government, all dragoneers must attend an academy to learn how to safely control their dragon's powers, so Anequs must leave her home and immerse herself in a culture and a schooling system that were not designed for her.

The author does a wonderful job of showing the many different ways indigenous people respond to the impossible situation they're put in, post-colonization, with no good answers; and the many different big and small manifestations of racism that they face, by people both well-meaning and malicious. Anequs finds both friends and allies, but even within these people she is often having to deal with their own internalized racism.

And I loved the worldbuilding! Although different language and symbols are used, because latin is not the language of science and education in this world, it is clear that the power of a dragon's breath is to break down anything into its constituent elements and rebuild them according to the direction of their person or people. So Anequs in learning vitskraft is basically learning chemistry, and the symbology that can be used to safely direct the power of a dragon's breath to create only the things you want.

And it's fun, too, to see a version of the world where a viking style culture is the one that is dominant in the colonial era instead of british culture, and the ways in which it does and doesn't change things.

(I do think that if one were to carefully draw out all cultural ramifications there would be even more differences between that world and our own history -- eg the clothing would NOT be our world's 19th century western fashion! -- but I do understand that that might be too big a project to undertake, to make every single thing make sense within the internal logic while still making it recognizably 19th century to the reader.)

Anyway I found it a thoroughly enjoyable book with a satisfying ending, but also it's clear from the book that there's more coming in the series and I only wish I could read the rest IMMEDIATELY. But that is not how linear time and recently-published books work!

A romance novel parody of Harry Potter written in response to jkr’s transphobia. A good-hearted t4t story of trans joy that combines things making no sense with things that are actually wonderful and fascinating worldbuilding (of a world which is distinctly NOT the world of the original hp novels), with delightful fourth-wall-breaking aspects. There are a lot of typos, and the style is very consciously romance-novel-esque with lots of epithets and things, so it took me a bit to get into it, but once I was in I was honestly hooked.

Also the author, Chuck Tingle, is out here on the internet openly being his wonderfully autistic self without shame, and encouraging everyone to live a life that centres love and the knowledge of everyone's intrinsic worth, and I really admire that!

So thanks Chuck. LOVE IS REAL.

Another of Ursula Vernon's fairy tale books under the pen name T Kingfisher, though this one is not inspired by a specific fairy tale, and is more a novel told in a fairy-tale-ish mode.

And it's very good at being a dark fairy tale, with the sense of the power of magic underlying everything, and the deadly sort of fairness/unfairness of the world. I loved it.

Vernon's prototypical protagonist type is a person who meets a horrible situation and responds with: "well, there's a thing that needs doing and I don't want to do it, but nobody else is going to, so I guess I'm going to figure it out." And this protagonist type is extremely soothing to me. I will read these characters of Vernon's endlessly.

I will say that I don't think that the merging of the two timelines of the story is done as smoothly as I'd like. The book opens in medias res in a dramatic episode, and then we go back in time to where the story starts, jumping back and forth between the two timelines until the backstory catches up with where the story began. The jumping back and forth part worked fine, and the linear narrative afterward worked fine, but the joining between the two was honestly pretty confusingly handled to me and I had to work at it to follow what had just happened with the timeline!

But that is absolutely my only complaint about the book and everything else is just SO great. It's the story of a princess named Marra who's pleased to be relegated to live in a nunnery because she's just not good at the whole politics thing and finds fibre arts much more interesting, but when the knowledge of something truly horrible occurring is thrust upon her, she goes on a quest to get the thing dealt with. On the way she collects various allies and travelling partners, every single one of whom I adore as well.

( cut for spoilers )

I always find it so funny when the cover copy on a book tells of a very different story than the one that's actually between the covers. "Clara seizes the chance, no questions asked" hahaha no Clara asks a lot of questions!

Anyway this is a book set in 1920's Washington DC in the Black community, with a main character who can see and talk to spirits, and takes on a mission on behalf of one of them in order to free herself from an agreement. Clara pulls together a team of other people who also have magical gifts, plus her friend Zelda who's not magical but used to work in a circus and isn't about to let Clara do anything dangerous without her.

I really enjoyed the depth of the setting of this book; the author clearly did her research, and it shows in the best ways. People and places and relevant issues of the time and the specific place are all integrated into the narrative, bringing it to life. Issues of classism and colourism within the Black community is a major theme in the book, and it emphasises the importance of solidarity against the bigger problems they all face.

I also loved Zelda and the way her friendship with Clara was portrayed. This is one of the important relationships in the book and I love that! Also another important relationship is between Clara and her dead grandma. Grandma ghosts best ghosts.

The aspect of the book that worked least well for me was three other members of Clara's team. They're three men named Jesse Lee, Aristotle, and Israel. And I kept getting them confused! They each have different backstories and abilities but I didn't feel like I got enough of a sense of their different personalities to be able to hold each one firm in my head as a different person. I kept having to think hard to remember which one was Clara's love interest, which one had which ability, and so on, which was fairly disorienting.

But overall it was a solidly enjoyable and interesting book. And I really appreciated one aspect of the ending, which is:

( cut for a mild spoiler for the ending )