May the Darkness be merciful (Black Jewels and more)

I can't make a good photo happen but I totes just got Twilight's Dawn & Shalador's Lady from the library support your local book distributory my dudes

and now, a new dilemma: I find it mildly embarassing to admit that I ship both a canon pairing and a het one, but I legit really ship Daemon/Jaenelle, with no caveats. after their collectively shit lives, and considering that they both genuinely enjoy each other, I just want them to have whatever unreservedly happy ending is available to them before their disparate lifespans shit it up for them again. so I predict that this anthology will give me the sads, in ways I thought I was immune to. bah.

a very good point! I believe Bishop was open-ended enough with the Realm descriptions that it could feasibly be any number of things, geographically. although the notion that the seasons in each Realm run the same seems like it did come from the books themselves. so that's another note to watch for on my next readthrough.

this is very interesting - I hadn't considered the darkness of various Realms to correspond to Blood strength, but surely it corresponds to something... the Winds are a mystery to me, so dragons make a pretty good explanation. (I attribute a whole lot of explanations to either 'unreliable narrators', 'dragons did it' or 'it's Dorothea/Hekatah's fault' tbh)

 

GOD I SHIP DAEMON/JAENELLE SO HARD... I think it’s the open, honest communication that goes on between them following his return in QotD, and the way they’re both so, so careful not to hurt each other, to the point where even the thought of doing it accidentally is painful. I need to get back to my own reread, and revist the first book where most of the basic are explained.

(I think it also helps that Daemon and Jaenelle do the ‘fated lovers’ trope in a way i can stand—instead of “oh I’ve found you now everything is just super” it’s “hey, I found you and I am determined to make sure this thing between us works, even if that means having to be Goddamn Adults about everything.”)

 

Spoiler: rambling

honestly i think daemon and jaenelle having roughly 13 years of forced seperation was the best thing that could have happened to them (though the circumstances were.... not.....) because it gave them the chance to meet again as adult equals and remove that power imbalance that was there from the beginning because jaenelle was like... a child........

it wouldnt have mattered how much daemon was trying not to influnce her, i think that it would have ended in tragedy if he’d been stuck around for eight more years watching her grow up and waiting for the woman she’d be

(honestly, i don’t actually know if he’d have been able to keep up his attraction to her; for all that daemon says that he was born to be her lover, especially as time wore on he was seeing jaenelle more and more like a little... cousin, more than a sibling, but still had familial inclinations there, between his father being her mentor and his role as an adult trying to have fun with her within the bounds of acceptable behavior—he has moments where he gets hit by the fact that he wants to love the woman she becomes, but they’re more and more infrequent as time goes on, and i don’t know if he’d have lost it entirely as time went on

i think that if they hadn’t gone their seperate paths, neither of them would have really been able to look at the other as an equal capable of consenting to romantic and sexual overtures; daemon would always be remembering the child and jaenelle would always be remembering the fond man she grew up with

so both of them having little reminders of meeting and being important to each other is good, but having that speration—having daemon not know anything about her teenage years, having jaenelle forgetting a large chunk of her most traumatic bits of childhood (with daemon incidentally included)—that was probably the only thing that ever let them get that romance off the ground)

 

read all of Twilight's Dawn yesterday/this morning and I'm. not mad? or upset, really? I am some combination of memes, however, as usual.

Spoiler: my reactions to shit

we find out in this collection that even Surreal was all like 'lol why do I suddenly want a kid' (the answer? spiders)

hashtag surreal deserved better still going strong. it is nice that she and Titian apparently got some mother/daughter bonding time when they offed Kartane tho. autocorrect wanted that to be mother/slaughter lol it's not even a bad replacement

Daemon continues to sensually caress his male relatives which lightens my heart somewhat

poor Rainier tho, he's all 'my family fear and misundestand me, all because I am fearsome and beyond their understanding' like yeah dude it sucks but a lot of average people got no time for that. somehow he ends up living a peaceful rest of his life without a Queen, as a desk clerk, so I don't even know what the fucking problem was. hashtag shrug emoji

I'm so glad we got so much Tersa content in these books... she my favorite

in conclusion here is something more pleasant: a tumblr post that brings to mind my most treasured headcanon. Kindred domestic cats. (link)

 

I WANTED.... RAINIER TO GET SOME DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE OF THE WARLORD PRINCE THING... also Karla to make a comeback, because the two of them were the only two characters that even hinted at non-heterosexual leanings in the Blood (how does homophobia present??? does homophobia present???? MCCAFFERY PLEASE.....) but I’m guessing it was one of those things she wasn’t comfortable exploring, especially not in a one-off anthology.

 

Wrong Anne. Also this clearly calls for fanfic.

 

SLDKFL;SDF YOU’RE RIGHT WHOOPS

Lucivar flies a Brown, Daemon flies a Bronze, Jaenelle flies a fighting Gold, obviously. Surreal flies a Green? Would Tersa be a Gold rider who lost her dragon maybe?

(Are Hekatah and Dorothea Green riders who never fed their dragons firestone and established weyrs filled mostly with greens/blues/browns?)

 

Surreal gotta have a green

 

I dunno how much it comes up in Tangled Webs (which I got on order at the library, so watch this space) but yeah in Dreams Made Flesh it's super hard to tell if Rainier's deal is 'everyone's a little gay for Daemon Sadi' (canon) or if we just found the only bicurious dude in the Realm

Spoiler: u aren't obliged to read this folks

Spoiler: my Black Jewels opinions are saltier than Lucivar's desert adventure

tbh one of the most frustrating things re: my continued reading of these books is how fucking hetero everything is??? the spirituality is hetero, the characters are super hetero, the various conflicts are super EXTRA hetero, and p much everyone accepts it as one of the parts of society that makes total sense. arrrrrrgh

(if u are reasonably wondering why I keep reading these books as a) a live-and-let-live fan who b) can't abide Man-Woman-Differences used as comic relief/character development/the entirety of a story's worldbuilding, the answer is: blackrom. I am literally in a one-sided kismesitude with the entirety of the Black Jewels canon. this means that it owns a part of me, and I've decided I can live with that)

so as with many things, when it comes to the heterocentrism of the Realms, I blame it on dragons. HEADCANON: dragons were intensely sexually-dimorphic fuckers with very basic and powerful drives re: sex and murder. maybe the longer-lived ones had more stability and were responsible for whatever the heck dragons did to serve the world before they vanished, Idk. but they DID vanish, and siphoned all their powers into the species they thought could handle it. now, humans having existed before they got Blood powers means they would have established relative degrees of genderqueerness like any range of societies does, because humans/animals enjoy sex and bond through physical contact and are also extremely creative. but introducing magic lizard murderfuck powers makes it much, much weirder. so the eventual format of Blood society is a compromise between humans' prosocial community-bonding group survival approach, and dragons' single-minded need to hoard mates, inseminate females, and eat the competition.

to address ur actual point, I don't think the Blood are necessarily homophobic, so much as just not realizing that queer is a thing? Daemon worries after flirting with Rainier that Jaenelle might be disgusted (she is, fortunately, turned on), so there may well be cultures or races that see non-hetero sexuality as weird and gross. I mean the entirety of Blood culture leans really hard on the Man-Woman divide, and blurring that boundary would either not compute at all, or register as an huge transgression, imo.

I got some deep onions on genderqueer landens, lemme tell ya

edit: added emphasis, v important

 

IMPORTANT TANGLED WEBS UPDATE: Rainier Likes Dudes

context: Daemon brings it up in a convo with Surreal. she doesn't seem surprised, and later confirms that it's nice to be interacting with a dude who won't get any pants feelings for her. one of the reasons Daemon continues to employ Rainier is so he doesn't have to seek out a new job where he'd be expected to fuck ladies.

I like that he and Surreal established a friendship with each other (Surreal? made a friend??? holy shit my dudes) but yeah I really wish we'd gotten literally anything more for him. every court has its own styles so maybe he could've found a dude? eventually? the Jaenelle-affiliated courts don't seem like they'd be the types to make a ruckus about it.

 

intriguing Shadow Queen update: apparently landens can hear kindred, if the kindred want them to? which is a) a very good and interesting idea to play around with and b) very confusing when contrasted with the fact that landens have no mental barriers at all, and Blood using telepathy on them is dangerous at the very least. the darker Blood, specifically, are capable of frying a landen's brain with even the most minor contact. so how do the kindred pull it off??? or is it just a sceltie thing? (possible)

 

The kindred contact was descirbed a being somewhat different to how human blood do telepathy, so it´s possible that differentness also makes it safer for landens. Like an artificial mental barrier
ETA: Meaning the extrastep it takes humans to understand nonhumans here functions as a sort of mental power filter.

 

updort

there's something like nine editors now, lol

 

I Finished All The Books update: this was a good idea and I am pretty happy with them??? how the fuck

first off, the fact that the post-trilogy books contain Daemon and Jaenelle Interludes is super helpful and actually addresses some things I figured would only be found in fic... such as, Jaenelle Tops For Once (and Everyone Is Aroused But Somewhat Unsettled), and my personal pet peeve, now resolved: Daemon's Actually Still Fucked Up But They're Working On It. the fact that he was so fucked up in the first place was what got me interested in him as a character, so it was super rewarding to see that addressed in a canon setting.

also the Shalador books are incredibly useful for getting a look at how a court is formed from the ground up, what it needs, how it's supposed to function, etc. it raised a couple entirely new questions for me, but overall I found it a great contribution to the worldbuilding.

ok who wants to discuss the possible relationship between the Blood and domesticated animals? (spoilers: ME)

Spoiler: a lot of words

so between the fact that the Blood can use spells or power to handle a bunch of mundane tasks, and the fact that the Kindred were seemingly purged from Terreille quite a while back, I propose that many of the Blood have little economic need for working dogs or cats. also, considering that Blood in general (and the tainted Blood in specific) have very little patience for anything they can't properly subdue, I don't think companion animals with magic powers would be a great fit in that environment. especially kindred companion animals! there were a handful of dog and horse Kindred that found a niche with the Blood in Kaeleer, but it's specifically stated that those Blood communities had a special bond with their animals. Blood traits in any species include aggression and self-determination, not exactly things one expects in a service creature that's supposed to do what you want. personally I wonder what the domestic Kindred thought about being owned and reproductively controlled by beings who shaped every aspect of their lives, but that's a hell of a digression to get into. but: those same domestic Kindred lived among the Blood without detection for centuries, and the books themselves allow for the possible existence of other hidden Kindred, so my theory is:

domestic cats are Kindred. they are domesticated in the sense that they live near and interact with humans, largely landens as that's where all the pesky mice are, but it is nearly impossible to own one since they will come and go as they want (using craft, obvs). therefore cats are culturally regarded, by landens, as extremely lucky and probably sacred, and their wellbeing is very important. it's like if the fae were almost universally benevolent, and you could entice them with food and peaceful nesting areas to help your household prosper. and the cats themselves, being a Blod race with their own castes and everything, would be a society unto themselves that somehow managed not to overpopulate the area within a decade. (cats are super fertile critters) I can imagine some Blood courts or households hosting cats, but again, unless they literally use craft to confine them, the treatment of the cats themselves would have to be excellent, so a lot of courts with selfish or cruel Blood would not be successful at this. therefore, it's unlikely that cat ownership by the Blood (at least in Terreille) would be a high status activity, since it prioritizes the care of the cats over physical ownership or trade of them. you could definitely get an enclave or two of dedicated 'cat families' who essentially end up with something resembling a pureblood fancy cat, though - if they have no requirement for working cats, but instead host them as a sort of secondary 'court', then you'd eventually develop fancy court Kindred. and since these Kindred cats choose to live as part of that household or court, then they would likely still watch over their humans, not as pest-catchers but as guards and escorts, much as Jaenelle's Kindred do.

ahhhh I love thinking about Kindred cats so much

 

YEAH I do actually really like the fact that Daemon's issues are a longstanding thing that they work on for... a long time, actually, because he's got a lot of 'em. (I also like that we get little snippets of Lucivar still working through his issues, even though they take on a different shape because certain other things traumatized him more than they did Daemon and vice versa.)

And these are GOOD BLOOD CAT THOUGHTS. I always found that "oh what, really, a cat race that hasn't come out??? doubtful" exchange hilarious, because a) we know that Blood large cats exist and b) if that ain't the most cat thing that you could picture though. "Oh, everyone else is pledging themselves to the Queen of Ebon Askavi? Lol. Whatever. We've got this."

 

I know right??? it is such a cat move. they're good. they're doing their own thing behind the scenes. ain't no one else's business.

 

CLOTHING TIME

for whatever reason, this video kept coming up in my youtube recommendations:

and it seemed like a very appropriate outfit for working class Blood and the majority of landens. so I tried looking up a men's version:

and found this, which looks like good men's working-class attire. then I fell into a youtube hole thanks to Townsends and started learning a bunch of stuff about cooking without electricity or running water, lol

as a diversion, we know that well-off Blood households have running hot and cold water, which is cool, but it requires a) the infrastructure of pipes in one's buildings and b) renewal of the heating spells on a weekly basis, so I am gonna assume that most landens either don't have running hot water (maybe not even running water) or if they do, it's sporadically maintained in badly ruled areas/only available to upper-crust or particularly wealthy landens. ditto with 'cold boxes' which also require renewal of spells on a weekly basis. so a lot of pre-industrialization cooking and preserving info is super useful for worldbuilding and class background - apparently the universal nature of wood-burning stoves, and the difficulty of perfectly ventilating your kitchen, meant that woodsmoke flavored e v e r y t h i n g and making a dish without smoke flavoring was very difficult and impressive. of course, if you're Eyrien and cooking directly over a campfire, that's probably entirely different tho :P maybe it's a mark of Eyrien Culture that everything you eat tastes like it narrowly escaped being lit on fire

back to fashion: considering how much wealthy European fashion changes through the centuries, I think you could easily make a case for any fashion from any time period to show up in one court or another. lots of the Blood like indulging in fashion trends to show off their wealth and taste, and they could afford to ping-pong between styles every week if they really wanted to. it looks like the clothing on the cover art tends towards slim fitting dresses with long drapey skirts, but that could be a young woman's style for all we know. the possibilities are truly endless. I'm pretty sure Daemon wears what's basically a tuxedo without a waistjacket or tie, and he has enough of a personal Brand that he doesn't mix it up much. I wonder what the other dudes wear though, and how much/if regional styles influence their clothing.