Shadow Scale (actual review)

[psocoptera]

Okay, so *now* I've finished it. Shadow Scale by Rachel Hartman, sequel to Seraphina, both very highly recommended.

Okay, because I am me, I have to start off with canonical poly ending. It is possible that the day will come when I am so jaded that canonical poly no longer delights me, but BOY are we a long way from that day as yet. Kiggs and Glisselda going through with the political marriage while finding separate-but-overlapping romantic happiness with Seraphina made a lot of sense to me, plot and character-wise, and I kind of like that Hartman wrote it very very sparely and is letting us fill in the details for ourselves, but with enough structure there that it doesn't just seem like she squished them all together randomly. (They actually feel a lot like a Xenogenesis marriage, to me, like, a sibling pair and an ooloi with whom they both have a sexual/romantic connection. I always assume authors like Hartman have read absolutely everything that I have, I wonder whether there was any conscious influence there.)

Okay, so, then. I am a big sucker for the transcendent mystical revelation ending - see my love of Curse of Chalion and Kushiel's Avatar - but I don't think I've ever seen one so purely humanist as this. I mean, I am interested in stories about what it means to be a chosen instrument and all that but this version of it, where it's entirely by chance/by choice and making instruments out of other people is the one real evil, this is so powerful. And then ALSO we get Giant Stompy Pandowdy (I have a deep love of Giant Stompy) - how much do I *love* the bit about thinking he was a featureless slug and all along she's been talking to his *finger*.

I really liked Seraphina coming to terms with the naivety of her desire to gather the half-dragons, the way that gets so completely subverted and distorted but, even before that, is so much more complicated than she might have thought. I really like books that "get" that everyone is the main character of their own story, and I like the *realization* of this as a coming of age plot. I liked the complexifications of dragon culture, the Porphyrian exiles (and particularly their *children*). And of course I liked all the little nifty bits about pronouns and skin colors and such.

OH, man, Orma. That was probably always coming, but ow.

I really want the story now about how Amy and Bran don't go home after the peace but instead go up to Porphyry and find Niesta and Bran has to deal with her having kids of her own and Amy makes friends with Brisi and, I don't know, ends up as an early adopter of thniks, or something. I don't know if I'm going to write it or not.

Comments

[glassonion]

Just finished Shadow Scale last night.

I'm amused that you see "canonical poly (happy) ending" where i see "gay people don't need to be the heroes in their own romantic stories, and can survive just fine on the sidelines as long as other people are nice to them occasionally." Don't get me wrong --- i loved Selda's final "oh you guys think you're so smart" scene, and it seems very reasonable to me that the story would play out this way --- i just don't see "the closet with a few sympathetic people who know your secret and like you anyway" as much of a progressive vision. I don't think readers of books about straight characters would settle for either sex without family connections (the Sammy Clay "happy ending") or family without sexual relationships as an unambiguously happy ending for those characters. So why should we settle for it just because the characters are gay? Why is this a happier ending if Glisselda has an unrequited crush on Seraphina, than if she has an unrequited crush on Lucian?

This may be where the spareness hurt, because you may be taking at face value that the two women would actually have a sexual relationship, whereas i see "there was no telegraphing of Seraphina's interest because Seraphina actually isn't interested," whether or not she sort of offhandedly wonders if she might be.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

So, this is a totally fair reading of course. I don't have the text in front of me any more, so I can't argue for having jumped to the "they're an equal V" interpretation on the basis of textual evidence as opposed to my own poly-colored glasses. I clearly totally *was* thinking they were ending up in an equal V - I mean, that Seraphina's relationships with Kiggs and Glisselda were similar and were both sexual and romantic - but, at the very least, I agree that it's weak that I'm so used to reading that kind of thing into very scant textual evidence because I'm used to not getting the same kind of onscreen scenes for queer pairings that we do for het pairings.

I honestly don't know how I would have felt about this ending, if you swapped Kiggs and Glisselda - if we'd been having a canonically gay Captain Glisselda-Seraphina romance, and then it turned out King Kiggs was sort of randomly in love with Seraphina not Glisselda, I might in fact have been like "why is this unnecessary heterosexuality intruding into this perfectly excellent gay romance, go away King Kiggs and find some other ladies", or I might still have been all "canonical poooooly!", I think those both sound like things I would say. ::grin:: You're definitely right that Glisselda and her romance arc was not nearly as central to the books as Kiggs and his.

I'm trying to think now of whether I can think of any cases of what I consider satisfying happy endings about straight characters who are in some fashion still "closeted" or lacking the whole ball of wax in their relationships. Kristin Cashore, in the Graceling series, has several couples who explicitly aren't going to marry, won't get to have bio kids despite wanting them, or... whatever the fuck happened with Saf in Bitterblue, I don't even remember. You're of course right that I can't think of very many, or any that are exactly parallel to your reading of Shadow Scale. It would be very easy to ask an annoying question like "should we only want depictions of queer relationships in progressive worlds, then", but in fact the Goreddiverse is so very progressive in so many ways that we clearly should be able to expect rampant progressivity *there*, so, regardless of your general feelings about queer stories set in homophobic worlds, at the very least we should have gotten Glisselda's state visit to Porphyry where they keep seating Seraphina in the "spouse" seat at banquets because what do you *mean* Kiggs is her primary, that's obviously wrong ::grin::. (I would happily write you a thousand words of that but I know it's not the same as getting it in canon.) So... yeah.

[glassonion]

Re "should we only want depictions of queer relationships in progressive worlds, then" - i think there are three possible questions here: (1) what is a depiction which the author can reasonably claim is plausible and sympathetic?, (2) what is a depiction which the author can reasonably claim is a happy ending?, (3) what does it make me personally happy to read right now this second?

So what i'm really questioning is (2) --- i feel like we're being sold this ending as a happy ending for Glisselda in particular (as well as for everyone else), and i don't buy it as a Best Of All Possible Worlds ending, given the expectation that it's 2015 and we the readership are no longer buying into the notion that gay people get a 20% discount on lifetime potentially happiness off the top just for playing. That doesn't have to mean the book is set in a world in which the Best Of All Possible Worlds is accessible --- it just means that, if it isn't, the author should be aware of that gap.

Specifically, i think, what rubbed me the wrong way (and what i really meant about "swapping", though i like your King Kiggs scenario) is that the entire book (and part of the previous book) had this level of tension in which The Problem To Be Solved was that Sympathetic Secondary Character was into the Hot Love Interest, and he Didn't Feel The Same Way but at the same time Was A Nice Guy. So for a bunch of the book you're supposed to be wondering, "How will these well-meaning people solve this terrible problem?" Will she turn out to be an idiot and thus unworthy of love? Will she die? Will she shack up with Orma and perpetuate the cycle of ityasaari? Etc. And then the big reveal is... they swap the Protagonist and the Hot Love Interest, and voila, problem solved, it's a happy ending now.

So i think it's legitimate for me to ask, how does that actually solve the problem? And, in particular, to want some actual textual evidence (which i still think was way too nonexistent, though i haven't actually read back for it) for the claim that it solves the problem because Phina is actually interested to the same extent that she's interested in Lucian. Because absent that evidence, my read is that it solves the problem by saying, "Well, it counts as a happy ending for a gay character to be in a relationship with someone who likes her well enough but is actually interested in someone else, because there's only so much lifetime happiness a gay character can have, whadya gonna do?"

Anyway, i will take my sour grapes elsewhere, possibly to the bat-internet to see if Rachel Hartman has had anything to say on this topic.

[psocoptera.livejournal.com]

You can go elsewhere also, but I *love* your sour grapes and want to hear every single one because here we are talking about a book instead of, like, logistics or whatever! I'm not trying to argue with you because I think your interpretation is wrong, I just think it's interesting how we read it differently.

Still without going back to the text, my recollection is that part of my willingness to board the Seraphina/Glisselda ship came from a sense of Seraphina as bi based on her past with Jannoula? Obviously Glisselda is not Jannoula and I'm not saying you can just swap similarly-gendered people in queer ships and it's all the same tra la, but I am saying that a past history of same-sex attraction does I think make other queer ships for a character read as more plausible (and helps to avoid the whole "not gay they just love each other" trope). My recollection is not great but I sort of think there was some "Jannoula is like my sister! ... no, waaaaait, she's my first crush" business there. (We apparently do own this book and I might in fact go passage-hunting for my own curiosity.)

I like your distinction of 1,2, and 3 re world settings for queer relationships, I think that's a useful distinction. And also the Lifetime Happiness Penalty. There's been some interesting discussion in hockey RPF fandom recently about authors choosing to engage with or ignore or specifically AU-ify questions of coming out and family/media homophobia and the extent to which 'whether that angst is there' still has to always be a *question* even if the answer is no - I guess I feel like we in 2015 are only still just coming out from under the edge of the lifetime happiness penalty? I think part of the problem with the whole Glisselda situation is that we just get *so little* sense of who *she* is on the inside at all - again, this is at the mercy of my faulty recollection but she had seemed much more of a secondary character to me, not so individually personal as Kiggs or Orma or Abdo or the other main characters Seraphina plays against? Does she ever talk about her childhood with Seraphina, say? I wonder if that sort of scene might have helped even if it wasn't explicitly Seraphina finding her hot.

[glassonion]

I just listened to this interview with Rachel Hartman, where the topic of this ending came up (unsurprisingly). I don't really have a coherent description here, but i guess i wasn't really impressed in terms of "is there a careful plot here?"

I mean, you're not wrong --- Glisselda *is* a secondary character. Enh, i think i have characterised what i found frustrating about this and would just be repeating myself from here. Oh, but one thing that really bugged me about the secondary-character thing is that Seraphina was the one who was being all "i'm sure Selda is being mind-controlled, dooooom" and it was Kiggs who was saying "i think you're underestimating her." And in the scene with the kiss, Glisselda says, "look, just pointing out, i'm the badass who got you out of this mess", and, like, *we are actually in Seraphina's head*. There's no way in which it is somehow inappropriate for her to say out loud "oh, huh, that's a really interesting point, maybe i did underestimate your badassness," because *we can read her mind.* (And she, y'know, doesn't. Which just doesn't seem like a very promising basis for a relationship given that the relationship with Kiggs is all about his amazing intelligence and acuity.)

Interesting about Jannoula. I was definitely not on that particular ship, but that doesn't mean it wasn't there --- i miss a lot of things when i read. Let me know what you find out in rereading.