May the Darkness be merciful (Black Jewels and more)

I have a question about BJ(black jewels) lore that I've never been able to figure out: what makes someone a queen??? (or a warlord specifically, but that's a quibble for another day) as near as I can tell, they're just straight-up born with Command Voice and expected to run a court when they're adults. are queens always born to queens, or from a queen lineage? Jaenelle's mom was a queen's sister, IIRC. if it's not a direct descent or a successor-to-an-existing-line thing (which makes no sense to me, since queens build their own courts from scratch???) then is it seriously a luck of the draw, or what?

tell you what I did figure out, though - why witches get so incredibly debilitated by their periods all the time: it's because they're losing blood. can u believe it took me like ten years to notice that, lol

 

Nope. Ok my example is not a queen but it was mentioned that Rainier was the only warlord prince in his family, and they didnßt know how to cope with him at all.
However, there does seem to be a bit of heredity. Not direct, only queens daughters are queens, but generally they seem to be in the family. Similar to jewel colour, there seem to be genetic markers with a slight element of randomness.

 

not to derail from BJT discussion, BUT

has anyone else read Etched in Bone yet and if so can we squee about it

 

There's also the little Eyrien queen that gets referenced in Queen of the Darkness-- her father's a warlord and her mother is a witch, so there clearly doesn't have to be direct lineage, there's some element of luck to it.

THOUGH it seems like while Queens are naturally driven to make courts by their own instincts (like how Warlord Princes seem to crave service of some kind) there's no requirement to actually make one. Darker jeweled Queens/WPs would probably be pressured a lot harder than lighter jeweled ones, but formal courts aren't a "and now you HAVE to be like this forever", they seem like more of a "well you're going to be doing this naturally anyways so we ought to school you in governance while we can" kind of thing.

AAAA I HAVENT BUT IS IT GOOD AAA

 

unrelated to anything: omg that little eyrien queen and Lucivar was so cute.

But yeah, Jeanelle mentions she does not have to have a court. Which makes sense, there might well be more adult Queens than places to rule sometimes.

 

Cassidy did lose her court to a Queen she was training too, and she had apparently gone back to live with her parents and figure out where she was gonna go from there before Jaenelle showed up with the offer to go to Terrielle. I imagine it becomes a mad scramble to find villages in need of ruling when too many Queens who want formal courts show up, especially since a full First Circle seems to be a requirement-- the gender distribution in the Blood is fairly even, so that probably contributes to the problem and makes lighter-jeweled Queens more likely to just shrug and avoid the issue entirely.

Speaking of, did anyone else notice that lighter jeweled Queens seemed to crop up randomly more often than darker jeweled Queens? That's not just Dorothea's purges responsible, because the trend continues in Kaeleer. Jaenelle's court is an outlier adn should not be counted, but every one of the darker jeweled Queens was basically assumed to take on the role of Territory (or at least Province, when there were Queens in some Territories that didn't want to step down) Queen from the moment they had their birthright jewels.

So there does have to be some hereditary aspect to it, but if Saetan's theory of power concentration and potency holds true, then it's more a factor of "powerful Queens -> aristo courts forming around bases of power because tithing leads to wealth disparities -> bloodlines are more strictly controlled and shopped for -> more Queens are born to known aristo families". And on the lighter jeweled and common folk spectrum, there's just... not that much interest in figuring out who your great-great grandmother was, if your daughter turns out to be a Queen, that's a happy accident.

(Also, Hayllians and Dhemlans seem to have much more rigid class structures than shorter lived races, which is interesting. Terrielle tends towards rigid class divisions more often than Kaeleer too, and I can't tell how much of that is Dorothea's influence and how much of that is the kindred in Kaeleer unintentionally pushing humans to be more casual in their interactions with the world.)

 

Hey, here's another non-BJT series to think about that gender divide in though: Bridges vs Landscapers in the Ephemera series.

Like, okay, how does that happen? Because the Dark Guardians became the wizards, and the Guides all became Landscapers, and I'm pretty sure that the Light Guardians didn't become Bridges but???? (Actually, scratch that, I'm almost positive they didn't because whats-his-face that Glorianna got her mack on with was a Guide but still not a Landscaper, wasn't he?)

Glorianna is obscenely powerful in part because her entire family has always been super powerful but also because her dad was a Dark Guardian and her mom's a descendent of the Light Guides, so she's that perfect mix of dark and light that makes her a true Guide, not just a Landscaper. But what the fuck is up with Lee? If Bridges aren't actually capable of changing the world and that marks Lee as other, then like where??? Did they come from?????????

 

IT IS VERY GOOD

YOU MUST READ THE THING

 

thanks for ur responses folks, I appreciate it. especially because I don't think I'm familiar with whichever series Cassidy is in. I reread book 3 on the weekend because why not, and yeah there is a lil Eyrien girl that Lucivar recognizes instantly as a Queen. since there's no mention of parents dressing their young Queens differently, and I can't recall any specific mention of Queenness having its own psychic scent, I assume recognition of Queen status is either based on some sort of behavioral cue or some sort of reflexive sense in the observer. I'm leaning toward it being a behavioral cue, personally. so my question now is: how come no one in Jaenelle's entire family realized she was a flipping Queen???

Spoiler: yells about worldbuilding for the next ten years

like, Alexandra Angelline is Queen of the territory. you would think she might know what a Queen looks like?? there are incredibly light-jeweled Queens in existence, and that doesn't somehow negate their Queenness. her family considers Jaenelle ALMOST without Craft, since they still attempt to teach her, and Craft belongs to jeweled Blood IIRC (edit: I may be wrong on this, bc when Jaenelle busts Alexandra down to jewel-less Blood status she retains 'basic craft'. alright, time to reread book one and see what the deal with Jaenelle's Birthright jewel acquisition was.) even if she'd actually been a near-null who might someday manage to descend to the White, she should still have been acknowledged as a Queen! how can an entire household be so dense as to just not notice that, somehow

we could assume that familiarity blinds them to the truth, because they only see what they think she's capable of as opposed to her actual capabiliy, but Queen status has nothing to do with ability. Lucivar noticed it in a freaking toddler! this is akin to insisting your child is four feet tall when they've been 6'5" their entire life. the explanation that makes the most sense to me is that Alexandra Angelline is dumb as a bag of hair, and everyone awkwardly went along with it because a) she was in charge b) Jaenelle was a problem child with nonexistent magical prowess who c) was uninterested in/unaware of the fact that she was a Queen.

my fan status re: the black jewels has evolved into 'that guy yelling at a pinboard covered in newspaper clippings and yarn diagrams' which I realize is not everyone's idea of a good time, so feel free to ignore the pinboard-yelling if u so desire

 

Part of it might also be that the main characters kind of skew the power scale in-universe -- Daemon and Lucivar are both super powerful Warlord Princes, and their powers just totally surpass the lighter-jeweled populace. The general impression I got was that Queens had some kind of psychic scent or wavelength or whatever, and that's what Lucivar was picking up on with the little girl. So maybe the two of them just have stronger Queen-detecting skills than Alexandra and the rest of Jaenelle's family?

iirc her family thought she didn't have any jewels, which is part of why they treated her as kind of a freak -- she's clearly a Witch but she has no jewels, obviously something is wrong with her! The fact that her jewels were always hidden might also have affected her Queen "scent" and made it less noticeable to people.

(disclaimer I haven't actually read the books properly in years and it is entirely possible I'm remembering some bits wrong. I need to do a reread, clearly.)

 

that's a good point, Queen-sensing might be easier for darker jeweled Blood. I'm gonna keep an eye out (rereading the first book atm, lol) for whenever somebody notices a Queen and see if that sheds light on it. Alexandra was able to detect something, though, because when Daemon shows up to live there for a while she has Jaenelle's room scrubbed until the 'scent' goes away, and even though Daemon can still faintly detect it in the house, it's elusive at best unless he's riffling through her shoe collection (classy man, Daemon). so Alexandra does notice some psychic trace, even though Daemon notices it more readily.

 

Some of the sequels do mention Queen scents that males are particularly sensitive to, so the question isn't just "why is Alexandra dumb as a bag of bricks" but also "SWEET SALTY CHRIST PHILLIP YOU ARE THE MOST USELESS BIRTH FATHER EVER".

 

See, the thing is (because I'm mad about this now) is that Alexandra should have seen a lot of things, but other hints throughout the book point to it being harder for lighter jeweled Blood being able to spot Jaenelle as Witch, and Alexandra only wore Opal iirc. Yes she was a Queen too, but she wasn't a natural Black Widow, and it's possible that the conflict there was enough to fuck up how she was reading the situation (along with her general priming to view Jaenelle and Wilhelmina as problem children-- she also treats Leland kinda like shit, so I think it's safe to say that she's a bad familial authority figure.)

But Philip?

He wasn't part of Alexandra's family. He was a Prince and he was Grey-Jeweled for fuck's sake! Yeah, his Grey was lighter than Surreal's but that's no goddamn excuse! Maybe he was trying to distance himself from Jaenelle because he knew he was her sire, but that's also no fucking excuse! For fuck's sake, her entire family was corrupt and stupid, and the only possible explanation for how stupid some of them were is that on some level, Witch realized that it was a mistake to be born here so she learned to hide as Jaenelle from toddlerhood!

 

Didn't Phillip wear the Grey? In The Shadow Queen Theran picks up on Jaenelle's Queen caste really fast, so if it's a matter of Jewel rank Phillip really has no excuse.

Then again given Alexandra's "lol if Witch was actually born I hope someone would strangle it in the cradle" maybe it was a necessary (unconscious) self-defense mechanism on Jaenelle's part. Less attention = less likely that anyone will twig to her being Witch = safer.

 

IN SHORT: THE BENEDICT-ANGELINES ARE BAD AND SHOULD FEEL BAD

 

I´d always interpreted that as all of them seeing the pyramids tbh. Which resulted in Jeanelle learning to hide things very quickly. (She´s secretive and ashamed of her differences when she meets Saetan at what, six?)

 

Excluding Wilhelmina. As far as i read, at least, Wilhelmina did nothing wrong and did not deserve that shit family.

 

This is true. Wilhelmina's worst crime was being also abused and afraid of her sister (which, imo, could probably have been due to the fact that she already saw Jaenelle getting singled out and was terrified of having that strangeness rub off on her more than it already had-- she was gaslit and isolated to hell and back on the estate) and I'm a little sad we never got to hear from her again after the third book.

 

I think Wilhelmina also saw Jaenelle as Witch once and it freaked the hell out of her (I vaguely remember this from the first book.) And tbh I think that's perfectly fair! Even Saetan and Daemon agree that Witch is awesome-but-scary and they know she's Witch; can you imagine suddenly seeing your odd little sister as Witch?