May the Darkness be merciful (Black Jewels and more)

When I first got here I had a delightful chat with @PRelations (ETA) and @kmoss and @budgie about the Black Jewels and other novels by Anne Bishop. We mentioned starting a thread and then totally didn't but today I'm trying to put off taking proper care of myself bored so here's the thread!

Content warnings: the stories being discussed center around survivors rebuilding a new family together, so conversation here will include mentions of abuse, rape, csa, slavery, torture, incest, self-harm/suicide, and doubtless other things that are slipping my mind. Reader discretion is strongly advised.

 

KICKS IN THE DOOR I SEE I WAS MENTIONED BLESS US EVERY ONE

Okay but. I've been thinking recently about how BJT handled a female dominated society, because some media likes to play the "no really women are TOTALLY equal/better, we just have our characters act with astonishment to women doing things because ?????" card and it's so. Dissatisfying.

So anyways! I've been thinking about how Eyrian's handled gender (where despite having Queens and the like, it was still very male dominated and even patriarchal) versus how the Del A Mon did gender (where the Queens were not only held in high regard, but all women were, with men more than willing to settle back into a subservient role which wasn't ideal but I mean it's Bishop's power fantasy) versus the more typical Hyallian/Dhemlan veiws of gender, which seemed to be mostly normative for all of Kaeleer/Tierrelle.

Because I do think that Bishop handled the concepts of Women In Power pretty well while still having all of the sexualized violence she has? It's interesting to me that there's almost an equal male to female ratio of rape victims and on screen castrations of both sexes, which is definitely an achievement of some... kind..............

But now I sort of want to know how gender politics as we mere mortals see them would be handled. Like, you can disguise your psychic scent a little, but can you completely mask it with a different sex's scent? We're told that witches and warlords are about equivalent strength, with Princes being around the same level as Priestesses/Healers, then Warlord Princes at second and Queens at first (Black Widows being the outliers, imo) so most of the hardline gender differences are going to come at that top tier of rank-- so like, how do you handle a transgender Warlord Prince? What about a Queen who goes by male pronouns, or even rejects the binary entirely?

Like I mean, in canon I know it would probably end with corrective rape turned brutal revenge murder but. I want to know.

(God I fuckin. I fuckign love this series so much.)

 

(Also like. Let me tell you about my Beta Kids BJT AU shit. :U Let me tell you about all of my BJT AU shit, because if there's a world I like to default to when it comes to AUs, it's BJT. There's so much to work with.)

ALSO SHOUTOUT TO ANNE BISHOP FOR GIVING BABBY PR HIS FIRST TASTE OF HEAT CYCLES N SHIT, BLESS U BISHOP AND EVERYTHING U WRITE

 

I have wondered so much about trans Blood and the only thing that makes sense to me is that they would have either an ambiguous psychic scent or the psychic scent of their true gender, not their body. Perhaps their scent would shift over time as they became more aware of/comfortable with their true self, although that doesn't really reflect the way it appears in canon.

Also I'm inclined to think that black widows are less a caste with a set strength level and more... Well, it seems that the Craft of the Hourglass can be taught although some are born to it, but I don't think it really corresponds to a general psychic strength. The skills of Black Widows are of such a nature that even a weak one could be deadly to a strong enemy given a chance to prepare, but it isn't much help to an unprepared Black Widow no matter her natural strength. If that makes sense.

And yes, I also like how any society in the realms that has unbalanced power between the genders has Problems, no matter what that balance is, while the natural healthy balance is complicated and dynamic and fluid from moment to moment, the participants being ultimately equal because they exchange power through consent.

Like the patriarchal Eyrian society has definite problems, but Lucivar's devotion to older ways (thanks in part to Prothvar and Andulvar) creates a better balance and thrives on mutual respect.

And i always read the Dea al Mon males as... not so much subservient, but I'm having trouble wording what I mean. I feel like theyre confident in their role in Protocol and inclined toward a certain androgyny and devoted to a cooperative harmony with the females and essentially embodying the subtle dance of Protocol in a way that makes even Saetan and his extended family look a little clumsy. I guess I see Dea al Mon as less constrained by their humanity, more like kindred in human form, with the less magical males helping to ground the more magical females, to the degree that such grounding is wanted or needed to stabilize their society.

Words are not my friends, I hope this is making sense.

 

Hmm. That makes sense actually! It's hard to get a good read on the Dea al Mon because Gabrielle and Chaosti are really the only memebers of that race we get to see. Which lends itself well to the more kindred than human interpretation, since I think even Saetan says that they're considered a definite Other in a way that the Eyrians aren't. And I think with the Dea al Mon there's this... return to roots sort of aspect to them? Like when Titian and Saetan are talking about the origin of the Blood, and they both have radically different ideas of why men would choose Blood women-- I think that Titian may actually be more correct with how the dragons viewed the people they scattered their scales on, but Saeten's reflection would be more along the lines of modern thought and current landen sentiment towards the Blood.

(Ngl I also liked that while the Blood were a minority, the districting system in BJT actually fucking works. How the landen villages and towns are assigned to village queens, to district queens, to territory queens was a genuinely smooth series of governing systems. Like christ, thank you for actually thinking of that Bishop.)

But yeah, I tend to think of Black Widows as a caste of learned Blood. I mean, Priestesses are too, I think? You have to be in training for it. But in general, Priestesses were of equivalent rank to Princes, because if you were too strong caste-wise to be a priestess you were typically a Queen. (Wasn't that an aspect of contention with Dorothea and Hecatah? They had the power but not the caste, so they had to gut society at the core to assume power.) Healer powers seem to be removed too, because those are innate, not taught it seems.

But Black Widows are definitely the ones that seem the most mobile amongst the castes, if only because of how removed they are. And even if Saeten and Daemon are the only males who are full Black Widows, there are definitely males who live and work in their enclaves too, so I imagine they're as transitory caste-wise as the females are.

 

There was that one character in Shalador's Lady who could mask his rank and caste, and since those seen to be as fundamental to someone's psychic ID as gender, I'd figure that you can change/ mask your gender 'scent' too.

(Their family running towards gender weirdness in caste and Warlord Princes, I wanted it to turn out that Lucivar's daughter was a Warlord Prince.)

 

Oh fuck, I should reread Shalador's Lady. I haven't reread any of the Cassidy books, and I know there's some good stuff in them. If you can mask your caste scent, that would make being trans and Blood easier and more viable-- though I do wonder if things like HRT would change it, or if it would be a purely mental expression of gender and could change over time like @Xitaqa theorized?

HMM. HMMMMMM.

(Also I would have loved that.)

 

I know someone made an offhand reference in the Pern thread, and I might have mentioned it in the kink thread, but if you give me a little bit I can hash out a mostly unspoilery premise I think.

 

I was struck on my first reading by how semi-modern the setting is, like it feels kinda Regency or Victorian or something, but the mention of HRT sparks my imagination for totally modern au, with landens developing tech to make up for the loss of so many Blood... Terreille goes through an industrial revolution and develops steam engines and then internal combustion, all that jazz, while Kaeleer remains a pre-industrial realm of magic...
/digression

 

OKAY SO

Black Jewels Trilogy (the original, no side stories included for this) is basically a Dark Fantasy book series written by Anne Bishop. The primary players are Lucivar Yaslana, Saetan SaDiablo, and Daemon SaDiablo (to give you a measure of how silly the names get at time) and Janelle Angelline. The world itself is based around a concept of ever changing court dance in terms of politics-- Queens rise into power and fall, and their courts (extending up to 13 circles of members with varying ranks and privleges) rise and fall with them. When it works, it is mostly harmonious and relatively sane. When it doesn't...

Spoiler: rape/abuse/child molestation/etc

The first book follows Janelle as a child, while the next two follow her in late adolesence and adulthood. The first book also follows Daemon and Lucivar as bedroom slaves and Saetan as a broken shell of a man, looking for any faint light to give him a reason to go on living. It starts off pretty dark, and then gets darker, because a lot of the themes (in the first book especially) revolve around rape, mental rape, the rape of children, and the ways in which rape fundementally shapes and alters several of the cast members. The prologue of the first book literally starts off with a character who was raped into losing her magic choosing to descend into madness to reclaim it. It's that kind of series. There are graphic depictions of genital mutilation. There are graphic depictions of torture, especially the sort of torture that involves people dying after losing all their skin. There are graphic depictions of children being tortured and murdered.

At some points, most of the characters have mental breaks-- Janelle and Daemon especially, and their revolving door of PTSD and Poor Coping Methods is actually about as plot significant as their December/Mayfly romance (so, pretty significant actually.) Point of note: While Daemon is deeply in love with Jaenelle even as a child, he actively refuses to indulge, and it repulsed by the thought of having an adult relationship with a child. So while child molestation is a huge fucking theme in the first book especially, it's not actually a focus of one of the primary relationships, and almost all of the canon (validated) relationships are healthy and filled with conversation and connection. So if blackrom is your kink, it won't show up much? I mean unless you count Saetan/Hekatah.

That said, while the Everything Is Awful themes continue through the main three books (and side novels) a lot of the series is specifically about survivors growing as people and moving past their abuse. And sometimes some of those survivors become abusers themselves, but the fundamental premise is none of them deserved it. One of them ends up having to relive the abuse he inflicted on others-- but not his own abuse. That's important. Because none of the characters are held as dirty or wrong for being survivors. When characters are referred to as 'broken', it's made abundantly clear that is isn't just the act of rape/abuse/etc that broke them, it is a magical issue that they (mostly) cannot fix, and not just one that is inflicted by pure abuse but also through magical means. (And is, at one point, a completely justified method of punishment for breaking the law.)

WHICH IS THE OTHER THING: The society in BJT is separated between the Blood and the landens (and the Kindred, but that gets into spoiler territory.) Landens are basically mundane humans, while the Blood are the ones with magic. Blood society runs on the circular court dance governing system, and one of the main laws is that murder is legal. Which isn't to say that it's unpunishable-- a family or the ruler of the court has the right to demand repayment for the loss of a member. But the act of murder itself is not punishable. (Many murders happen throughout the book. So many murders.)

Their magic itself is based on mostly psychic powers, with some magic-magic thrown in. Characters have varying strength based on jewel color (which you get during a ceremony at around age 8 I think?) and can descend to a darker and more powerful jewel color (at age 20 I think.) Alongside this, you have castes, which are dependent on your sex and influence your degree of social mobility as well as your power. A Red-jeweled Warlord is not going to have as much influence as a White-jeweled Queen in a lot of places. So that adds another aspect to the court dancing, and is actually super interesting?? GOD THE MAGIC SYSTEM IS SO COOL IN THIS SERIES I SWEAR.

I mean, the series itself is like, Dead Dove The Series. And it's got a lot of hokey moments. But oh my god, it is genuinely one of my fave series. If you want a physical copy, the original trilogy still gets sold in collected form. Digital copies are also available too though, and they're pretty nice.

 

ALSO LIKE. SPOILERS ABOUND IN THIS THREAD BTW. It's hard to discuss a lot of the themes/characters without being at least a little bit spoilery, but very little of what we've said so far is actually plot relevant.

 

Honestly I was kind of surprised when Cassidy&co ended up in Terrielle because I felt like it was going to be a lead up to "Terrielle is secretly Earth all along" and I'm pretty happy to be proven wrong. I think it would be really cool to have landens discovering steam power and electricity though, especially with what that would mean for the weaker Blood.

Daemon makes a point about how darker Blood take so many powered things for granted because they need to bleed off that strength, while lighter jeweled Blood get left in the fucking dust, and that has so many interesting implications for a industrial revolution in Terrielle spreading. I bet that the electric engine would kick off more than a coal powered one though. I can't see Kaeleer allowing for shit like strip mining and oil pipelines, especially not with how much coal-powered factories fuck up the air and water around them.

That said: Warlord Prince vs a tank. ROUND ONE, FIGHT.

 

I think I assumed, due to the extreme gender binary/gender essentialism, that the Blood would be intensely transphobic. They do seem to have problems with homophobia, particularly the way Queens/female Blood often expect sex whether or not the male is interested or not, and vice versa. Also, there's the entire "Blood women MUST be initiated to heterosexual sex or risk Losing Their Powers Because Rape." (Iwas kind of reminded of the Witchworld novels where the Witches had to be virgins, and if they had sex or were raped, they lost their powers.)

 

Yeah, I'd definitely say that being trans would be tricky as hell. The Blood aren't... particularly tolerant as a whole (though Rainier seems to mostly suffer from being a Warlord Prince over being gay and that's interesting.) This is one of the reasons I would have liked to get more with Karla, either her being explicitly gay or explicitly ace and how that affected her.

I mean, we know she does the the thing with Lucivar and it's not completely traumatic, but that's a pretty messy way of handling it. And the SaDiablo/Angelline family as a whole was considered weird for how tolerant they were, so they're probably not the right metric for "how would trans/gay Blood be treated."

I'm betting it's a lot less of an issue the lower in the ranking you are.

 

But notably the extended SaDiablo family became the rulers of the entire realm, so I would expect their attitudes to influence their territories. Every witch or warlord who trains in their courts will be learning their way of looking at things to some degree. We've seen how imperfect this us - some real assholes have gotten through the system without really learning better, but I always got the impression that the prevailing attitude in Kaeleer was continually shifting their way.

It felt like Lucivar had the steepest uphill battle bc Eyrien stubbornness but even he was seeing real results over time.

 

Pls consider: A transwoman queen. So much potential for dead dove style fuckery as in the original, but also as in the original, a chance for hm. Improvement?
I feel like for example someone like Saetan would be willing to learn/understand something new, maybe not immediately but eventually. (For all the know, there were trans dragons and ways to handle transness that got lost with them that Draca might know about if said trans queen found her way into Ebon Askavi)

 

I like I like I like
And i was thinking that the Craft doesn't really have ways to radically remake the body the way some fantasy worlds do, so magical transition is probably out...

...but Draca sort of proves otherwise, so...

 

Consider the implications of Jaeneles not entirely human true form in the abyss. Also the dream thing. I bet if you found a skilled enough Black widow they could make you a spell web to make your body match your internal map of self.

 

That and there are more traditional means of altering hormones, which can have pretty radical effects in and of themselves. So a combination of basic Healer kit skills, internal sense of self affecting external perceptions, and good weave over top it would lead to a pretty well passing trans person, male or female.

I imagine there's a way to map certain sensations to different parts of the body too, so you could not only make a web to look like your sense of self, you could probably make one that felt like your sense of self too.

(Personally I've always been fascinated by the idea of trans dude Warlord Princes. And trans lady Queen who were Warlord Princes first. I actually have a character I've been tossing around who is a Warlord Prince despite ID-ing as female, and it's almost be as interesting having gender non-conforming WP/Queens as well. I mean, what do you do with a female Warlord Prince?

Like, with warlords/witches and princes/priestesses there's no additional magical and socialization rules attached, so swapping between those would be difficult maybe, but doable. But Warlord Princes and Queens have so many rules and cultural notes and special magical embodiments that to move from one to the other would be such a monumental thing that would be??? So fucking cool to examine????)