#marjorie liu

[theforswornelite]

ITSSSSSSMAHHHHHHHGURLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

[tinkerbitch69]

X-23 #11 by Marjorie Liu with art by Sana Takeda

Jubilee: Is Laura gonna be ok? 🥺

Wolverine: don’t worry about your sister, kitten. Drink your blood.

Jubilee: ok. yay! 🧃🩸🧛🏻‍♀️

Wolvie bringing along blood juicebox’s for his adopted vampire daughter 🥹

[burninblood]

X-23 (2010) #11

The dynamic really was

Remy 🥰

Jubes 😆 (🧛‍♀️)

Laura 😔

Logan 😠

[lakecountylibrary]

Read what the librarian is reading!

Here's Kate's current TBR pile:

Honey Lemon Soda (volume 3) by Mayu Murata

Taran Wanderer (book 4 of the Chronicles of Prydain) by Lloyd Alexander

Sweet Valley Twins Volume 4: The Haunted House by Nicole Andelfinger

Uprooted: A Memoir about what Happens When Your Family Moves Back by Ruth Chan

Noodle & Bao by Shaina Lu

Twenty-four Seconds from Now by Jason Reynolds

Ditching Saskia by John Moore

Thief of the Heights by Son M.

This Land is our Land: A Blue Beetle Story by Julio Anta

Girlmode by Magdalene Visaggio

The Strange Case of Harleen and Harley by Melissa Marr

Wingborn by Marjorie Liu

Full Shift by Jennifer Dugan

The Terrifying Tales of Vivian Vance by Josh Ulrich

See more of Kate's recs

[comicsreading]

Monstress 1-6.

A beautiful violent story of a woman trying to find her mother and about the best inside her while a world war rages on.

[undefinedbehavior]

I am begging you all to read Monstress already.

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #51 – Monstress Volume 8: Inferno by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

This is the last volume of Monstress that’s currently published and (since vol. 9 is coming out in November) the second-last I’m going to read this year. Which could be either a good or a bad thing, I suppose. This is the first volume I can say I genuinely didn’t enjoy, not even grading on a curve fro the highs of the rest of the series but in general. Not awful, but not good either – by far the most ‘comic-bookey’ plot arc so far, and I really don’t mean that as a compliment.

Through a variety of contrivances involving Maika’s friends journeying to the centre of her mind to try and wake her up from her coma and finding a massive and seemingly living statue of Adara Farclaw – the previously semi-mythical ancient hero-sage of the cats – our main cast (plus the ghost of Maika’s childhood self created by the sheer intensity of her own self-loathing) find themselves on the prison world where Zinn trapped all his kin to keep them from devouring the world we’re more familiar with back in pre-history. They’ve adapted surprisingly well, adopting humanoid forms and farming for the food they need. Immortal but sterile, their history since has been dominated by an endless race war between the first generation Fallen Houses (Zinn’s peers) and the second-generation and much reduced in grandeur (but increased in numbers) Defiled. Zinn, Maika, and the fragment of the Shaman-Empresses’ mask they brought with them are a chance to upset the balance of power, or perhaps even escape – and both sides are willing to do anything it takes for that chance.

Though all that plot aside, the actual point of the volume is to a) provide great reams of lore on the Monstra in general and Zinn’s past and present relationship with the rest of their species in particular and b) give Maika a chance to work on her self-esteem issues and guilt over accidentally killing and eating her mom as a child by providing a tulpa of 10-year-old her to scream at, protect, and reconcile with. Also a bunch of stuff about cats.

I can see the version of this story that works for me, at least in broad strokes. But yeah, the one that actually exists really didn’t. The largest part of that is just allocation of narrative resources, I think? As the book goes on, it has become steadily less interested in the themes and aesthetics I find more compelling to focus on it’s deep lore mythohistory and melodrama among the elder gods, to the point of just leaving the actual setting with its fascinating politics and societies entirely for basically the last two volumes. It begins to make me question why I’m still reading. Maika as a character is profoundly interesting, but having her just clearly announce her issues to a literal embodiment of them is not, to me, particularly compelling reading.

On an aesthetic level, the strange and alien prison planet let me deeply unimpressed. It was all so..familiar. Even the two warring nations of eldritch god-monster have ended up basically human-sized and human-shaped, farming and eating and using tools and building structures in instantly recognizable ways. There’s an excuse offered, but I’m still left wondering why even bother if it’s going to be so unspectacular.

I also found myself disappointing in how...monotonous, I suppose? The aesthetics of technology are growing to be. The guns, tools and armour of these cat worldwalkers who’ve been living underground on this prison world for centuries look almost identical to what technology of the Shaman Empress and the toys the Blood Court uses and- Even if you can torture and justify it all to make sense, it just gets boring and samey eventually, you know? Makes the world feel small.

Which is related to my thematic issues with the volume, in a way. The story is clearly much more interested in the grand, superhuman drama of the monstra, the exploration of multiple worlds and lost continents, space age high technology, more species and relics and myths and just – it all piles up so much that the result just ends up feeling more generic and boring than the more focused and detailed world of the first few volumes was. This is made far worse (for me, anyway) by the fact that Zinn seems to have been personally involved with literally every major historical personage that was mentioned at any point.

The most concise way to put it is that at the start of the story Maika et al really felt like people inhabiting a world, and now it’s at Star Wars levels of the world feeling like a canvas for a specific set of people’s melodrama. Nothing wrong with that, in the slightest – I just prefer the other, and feel a bit cheated by the shift.

On a different thematic level I kept waiting for some real, like, narrative pushback or reversal about how the Defiled are treated as these disgusting morally abhorrent abominations for the fundamental crime of being genetically impure and ‘spiritually mutilated’ and...never really got it?

Anyway, pacing wise the arc is much too short to be a complete, satisfying version of the story it wants to tell, and much, much too long to be a part of the longer story it is a detour from. The story never becomes offensively bad, but I am honestly reading as much out of inertia as anything by now.

[leer-reading-lire]

Monstress

[newx-menfan]

Laura Kinney isn’t the “Goodie Two Shoes” her fans make her out to be…and other thoughts… 

Part 3: “Laura has Become Boring”

Like many popular writing tropes and commentaries- “Women in the Refrigerator Syndrome”…”Manic Pixie Dream Girl”…”the Reader is the Villian”…”the Male Gaze”…

“The Mary Sue” is another trope that has become so simplified, critiqued, criticized and overused by writers, readers, and viewers; that it has essentially become totally meaningless.

Tropes ARE inherently neutral. WiTRS doesn’t have to be (in my opinion) inherently sexist or bad storytelling; how writers use it determines if it is that way or not.

“The Dark Phoenix Saga” IS WiTRS…but I don’t agree that it is sexist or bad writing. The storyline IS still about Jean more than Scott; while her death does further Cyclops storyline, it also affects pretty much everyone in the book after. It’s about Jean’s relationships as a whole- not just with men, but with characters like Storm as well. “The Dark Phoenix Saga” has an obvious effect on the development of Kitty Pryde, for example; it sets Kitty’s whole life on a different path. 

Jean ultimately keeps her autonomy by choosing to die and the focus of the story is essentially on the examination of the darkness lurking within ourselves…or it’s about female sexual repression, depending on your personal analysis… (remember, Claremont didn’t initially represent “Phoenix” as necessarily “good” or “bad”…it’s only modern writers who made the force “evil”…)

The original movie adaptation of this story however is DEFINITELY WiTRS…and kind of sexist…Jean’s autonomy is completely gone and the focus is more on how this will affect Logan, than on Jean’s personal growth as a character. 

The point of this example is to highlight the fact that tropes AREN’T ALL BAD. It’s just when they become too common and too poorly written…do they become BAD. 

The Mary Sue trope WAS initially defined as:

noun

noun: Mary Sue; plural noun: Mary Sues

(originally in fan fiction) a type of female character who is depicted as unrealistically lacking in flaws or weaknesses."she was not a ‘strong woman’ so much as an insufferable Mary Sue" Origin

1970s: from the name of a character in A Trekkie's Tale(1973), a parody fan fiction story based on the US television series Star Trek .

While the definition purposefully LISTS “female characters”; many male characters have since been labeled as “Mary Sues”, yet this trope was initially deemed as sexist and a straw man argument against female characters in general and the term has been more or less done away with…

Yet again; tropes are, in my opinion, typically neutral, and as many have pointed out over the years, many characters that were considered “Mary Sues” are still decent characters; I don’t think creating the trope to point out a lack of development or story believability was wrong, but I do get readers frustrations in it being predominantly only applied to female characters.

I am also not arguing Laura *IS* a Mary Sue… but I will argue that Marvel and fans have kind of made her one…. and that’s why recent “X-23” books have been so boring.

———————————————————————

When Craig Kyle initially wrote Laura, Laura had clear flaws: her whole story WAS described as “A Samurai sword, trying to be a ‘real girl’”…

Laura’s internal struggle was essentially- “man vs. self”; what does it mean to “be” human?…am I even “human”?…do I have a “soul?”…what does “autonomy” look like?… What do I really even “want” from life?

Laura WAS Frankenstein’s monster…trying to be human…

Laura HAD clear desires…but was socially unable to really act upon them…

Laura desired to have a parental attachment…but was denied that with Sarah Kinney, her sensei, and Logan essentially rejecting her or dying….

Laura desired to have a family…but was forced to lose them when the Facility tracked down Debbie and Megan and they went into hiding…

Laura desired to leave the facility and violence behind…but is still ultimately forced to kill…

Laura WAS a truly complex character; which is why even when some readers accused her of being “A Mary Sue” when she was initially introduced…it never really stuck. 

It’s really interesting to me that fans often reject Laura being sexual… or flat out admit that they don’t like it…when on panel, it’s shown to be another clear desire for “humanhood”…

In “NXM”, there is a clear scene of Laura watching Hellion sleep- Hellion is naked except for wearing a pair of pants and is obviously dreaming of another girl. The scene clearly indicates through voyeurism, that Laura desires Hellion sexually as well as emotionally…but is too socially unaware to formally initiate anything…

The central theme of Laura is she desires things…but does not have the ability to access them…

A lot of the complaints around making Laura sexual is her status as a sexual assault survivor- which I personally disagree with.

I would argue it connects to Laura central conflict of longing for human experiences… and ultimately struggling to achieve them…to return to the analogy I made in Part 1, this desire fits in with the proto-origin of “X-23”; in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, the monster longs for a companion and tries to force Frankenstein’s hand to make him one, after being continually rejected by the rest of humanity…

The struggle of wanting a healthy sexual relationship…despite having experienced rape and abuse…IS a relatable struggle… and l often truthfully feel a tad bit uncomfortable with some fans veering into wanting Laura to be asexual SOLELY because of stereotypes rather than real textual representation of her being asexual in her stories…

Laura isn’t the only character that continually gets this stereotype- Illyana is often represented by some fans as asexual solely because of childhood trauma, despite clear sexual subtext in stories with Kitty Pryde. 

It’s essentially telling certain SA survivors:  “You have to be THIS WAY, to be considered authentic”…and I just frankly don’t think that’s fair.

Besides struggling socially, Laura often struggles emotionally. 

Laura under KYOST is often subtly arrogant; in “X-Force”, Laura sets off a series of explosives that she purposefully withheld from her teammates. Laura’s commentary on Angel being on the team is both brutal and hysterical; she always assumes she knows tactically what’s best.

Laura assumes her methodicalness and calculating behaviors make her immune to being emotionally compromised…and yet Laura’s continual chink in her armor is her emotions.

Laura either attempts to repress her emotions entirely through self harm, or finds herself acting out on them. There is no real emotional control.

This is shown with Laura breaking the mirror in the girls restroom after Surge’s kiss with Hellion, losing her cool when Deathstrike harms Hellion, or her vaguely suicidal behavior when she’s infected with the Legacy Virus and later her suicide attempt with vampire Jubilee…

As much as Laura yearns to escape the violence of her childhood…there’s oftentimes also a subtle pride in her skill. Laura often recedes back into violence…because that is what is most comfortable to her. She understands it. She doesn’t have to “grow” or deal with complex situations like love, if she just stays “a weapon”. There’s a vulnerability into having to resist her training and to try and be a “real” person…

So Laura often chooses the “easiest” path- which is why she joined “X-Force”…

On some level- Laura IS proud of her skill. She is proud of being “the best”…

You see it in “Mercury Falling”. You see it in “X-Force”. You see it in “Target X”. Whether Laura will admit it or not- she feels pride over her abilities. At times, it DOES feel like Laura is showing off.

James Mangold did a nice job with this in his representation of Laura in “Logan”; from the film centering around the iconic Western “Shane”, to Laura and Logan’s conversations about killing. In the film, Laura struggles consistently with the questions about killing and whether some killings are “right”.

“The killing. There’s no going back from it. Right or wrong is a brand. A brand sticks. There’s no going back. Now, you run on home to your mother and tell her … tell her everything’s alright. There aren’t any more guns in the valley.”

The line at the end is especially grabbing, because the tragedy of Laura is… she can’t really go back either; no matter how hard she tries… 

She ultimately isn’t “Pinocchio”, who can become a “real boy” at the end… she is “Frankenstein’s monster”, who on some level is always wandering the world alone.

The problems started when writers wanted Laura to fit a more and more a generic superhero role; especially when Laura took on the role of “Wolverine”; she was either written as a “female Logan”…or a much more simplistic female hero archetype instead of “Frankenstein’s monster”…

Liu, Hopeless, Bendis, Taylor, Hickman, and other writers decided to essentially explore the question of- “What would happen if Laura GOT all the things she desired?”

Laura desires a parent…and she gets that with Gambit, and later Logan fully accepts her as his progeny. 

Laura desires a family- and she gets that through Jubilee, Gabby, Daken, ect…AND the return of Megan and Debbie…

Laura desires to stop killing- and she does.

Laura desires a relationship- and multiple writers try to make that happen with Jubilee …Angel…and Synch…

The problem with this is, there’s little to no real conflict in Laura’s life now. Laura essentially has no goal to work towards.

”Pinocchio” ends when he becomes “real”… because the harsh truth is… no one’s interested in following the story of “a real boy”…

The main focus in Laura’s storytelling was essentially “man vs. self”…but now that there is no “self” to be in conflict with…what do you do??

Frankenstein has been accepted and welcomed thoroughly, with open arms…so what does he do now??

Laura’s rogues gallery…is frankly dismal, and with no internal conflicts left to face now… it is nearly impossible to really create a clear foil TO Laura…

Gone is Laura’s debates whether she was human. Gone is Laura’s social awkwardness and introversion (writers tried to textually justify this in-story, but it was frankly lackluster and poorly done). Gone is Laura’s moral struggle with killing and gone is Laura’s goth and edgier clothing.

Everything that made Laura is essentially slowly removed; including her flaws and weaknesses…making her a “Mary Sue” bland character…

Liu at least attempts to keep some of the initial flaws and tribulations in Laura’s initial jealousy of Jubilee, her struggles with her emotions and the question of whether she has a “soul”, her struggles with coming to terms with her past…yet Liu oftentimes removes Laura’s emotions and arrogance and the parts of Laura that make Laura interesting… at times Liu’s Laura just feels… flat…robotic…too perfect and too sympathetic, with none of the sharp edges that made KYOST’s Laura so interesting.

Laura is somewhat always the “poor pitiful bullied girl” in Liu, instead of a complex character that makes complex decisions. Where Kyle hints that partially Laura joined “X-Force” not just because of Cyclops and her feeling she couldn’t say “no”…but because on some level Laura is somewhat scared of fully abandoning her violent past, for a new hopeful “unknown”…Liu purposefully represents anyone questioning Laura being on “X-Force” as just “jealous and mean”…

Laura is more or less represented as needing “protection” in Liu’s version in the form of Gambit and Jubilee; where KYOST’s Laura grew from interactions with peers and Megan. There’s a more of a childlike and helpless element to Laura that KYOST didn’t really have. Laura is represented as needing “cared for”, in a way that almost feels infantilizing.

Bendis more or less created an entirely new character, complete with “Whedon-speak” and the generic “spunk” all female teen superheroes are routinely given anymore. Laura’s struggle with desiring sex and intimacy but unable to initiate are also gone…Laura now openly hugs Cyclops…she has a one night stand with Angel and her trauma is more or less hand waved away because it’s “uncomfortable” and doesn’t fit the mold comic writers now want (notice how around this time writers ALSO removed Mockingbird’s history with sexual assault…)

Hopeless tries to represent Laura’s desire to be human, by saying that her change in personality is an attempt to escape from her past…to not be labeled as “damaged”…yet the problem, besides the arc centering more on Warren’s “angst” over becoming “Death” and reading as Warren feeling more upset about Laura emasculating him than genuine concern for Laura…is that it ultimately feels inauthentic…

Why didn’t Laura attempt this in “NXM”? Or in “Avengers Academy”? Or in “Target X” while at school with Megan...or with the “NYX” kids?…

Laura DID, at times, attempt to fit in- but I would argue she ultimately refused to adjust to norms because she desired more than anything to be her “authentic self”…Laura HAD to have enough social training to blend in on “missions”…she is capable of “fitting into social norms”…we see that both when she kills the presidential candidate and when she tracks down Megan from the kidnapper…she ultimately just didn’t WANT TO consistently pretend to be someone else.

We see Laura going along passively with David’s pseudo “Danger Room” games to fit in, in NXM…and then ultimately breaking decorum by repeatedly rescuing Hellion and treating him as “helpless”, much to his annoyance…

Laura on some level HAD to know people don’t talk repeatedly about murder or challenge adults in “Target X”….and yet she utterly breaks decorum again after arrogantly telling the teacher that their data is “flawed”…

While Laura may not grasp spying is wrong, I am sure she was told not to be in students rooms at certain hours…she ultimately breaks the rules and watches Hellion while he sleeps, not out of misunderstanding, but truthfully for her own personal desires…

Laura had always WANTED autonomy…to be her “full self”…as flawed or awkward as that “self” may be…so it makes no sense that she would suddenly try to change her entire personality just to “fit in”…

You can argue Laura doesn’t fully commit; putting herself in constant danger despite Warren’s criticisms and having to listen to him accusing her choices of being akin to self-harm…and while there’s still some arrogance in Laura’s representation, seeing herself as invulnerable, I think ultimately this representation negates previous representations of Laura (along with making everyone hate Warren while reading it…)

Taylor in my opinion, struggled with writing Laura just as much. There were times, like Laura ultimately killing Kimura, Laura seeing the similarities between abandoning Gabby and Logan abandoning her, or Laura finding her dead mother alive…that were solid and interesting and authentic to previous representations of Laura.

The problem with Taylor, is that I think he ultimately wanted Laura to be a simpler, easier character to write for.

Neither Taylor nor Liu, I felt like could write Laura as flawed. The Laura in their books was always sympathetic, always represented as a tad bit too perfect. Taylor even makes a religious allegory out of Laura in “Immune”, with Laura literally being “Jesus” to Wolverine’s “God”…

Where Liu’s version veered into “pitying” Laura too much…Taylor seemed flat out hesitant to give Laura any real narrative conflict; Laura’s khaki wearing clothes more or less physically reflected the boring, bland turn writers had ultimately made for the character.

Laura AND Gabby…on some level, become one note…feeling more akin to watching a sitcom, than a representation of real siblings…

Tamaki, despite having the weakest run, I feel actually did the best job with this question…“What would happen if Laura GOT the things she desired?”

Where Tom Taylor looked at all of Laura obstacles as something to remove so Laura could have an easier, happier existence…Tamaki is the only writer to showcase that even “getting what you want”…is objectively…unpleasant and hard…

Laura doesn’t just perfectly get along with Gabby, like they are living in some sitcom. 

Gabby is given very human desires that often DON’T match up with Laura’s…to have a birthday…to protect her robot sisters…to be an individual…and Laura often doesn’t really know how to handle that.

I would say the most compelling and truthful moment we’ve gotten of Laura in a while, is Laura unable to handle her anger and blowing up at Gabby.

Laura is selfish in this moment. She lets Gabby “go” and pouts about it…internally justifying her actions as “right”. In that moment, Laura just sits there and feels bad for herself; not caring about Gabby’s feelings around the robot clones or the trauma Gabby experienced losing her other sisters.

Tamaki wasn’t afraid to represent Laura as, at times “wrong”. Laura doesn’t perfectly make every correct decision or have some witty one liners about “Nazi Stomping boots” while being some infallible moral paragon…

Gabby is equally allowed “personhood”, by having desires that oppose Laura’s. The tension in Tamaki’s storytelling is the opposition of Gabby’s and Laura’s desires.

———————————————————————

Ultimately, when people ask “Why was Hellion the most popular love interest”…OR “Why was the trigger scent such an interesting plot point”…I would answer… because they added TENSION in the story…

Because no one knew if Laura would ever overcome the influence of the Trigger Scent or if she would ever end up with Hellion…

The difference between Craig Kyle and all the other authors mentioned, is Kyle understood that readers don’t REALLY WANT characters to be happy…

No one wants Beast to turn into the prince at the end of the Disney movie, or Frankenstein to make his monster their “mate”, or for Pinocchio to become a “real boy”…

Those stories END the minute all the conflicts are resolved…

The fans that chronically go off on writers for giving Laura strife…also tend to be the fans that are unhappy with how boring Laura has been since YKOST and Liu…not realizing that those things are connected…

That fandom has kind of made Laura… a bit of a Mary Sue.

[nfcomics]

MONSTRESS no.51 • cover art • Sana Takeda [April 2024]

[burningfudge]

Black Widow (2010) #4

[burninblood]

beautiful Phil Noto art from X-23 (2010) #21

[smashpages]

‘Monstress’ wins this year’s Dragon Award

Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s long-running title from Image Comics takes home another award.

[thelog]

ear worm of the week:

[random-bookquotes]

As the poets say, victory is a pair of twins names boldness and caution.

Marjorie Liu, Monstress Issue #22

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #3 – Monstress Volume One: Awakening by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

Monstress is one of about three comics I’ve ever considered myself an unequivocal fan of. I, alas, lost track of things during a hiatus a while back, and got to the point where I barely remembered where I was or what was happening. So, as a palate cleanser between longer books, I’m making it a project for the first chunk of the year to reread this from the start until I’m caught up again.

This is a very high concept series – a matriarchal dieselpunk fantasy world vaguely inspired by 1920s/30s East Asia with a strong art deco aesthetic. The world is divided between the Arcanic Courts – kingdoms ruled by the animalistic ‘Ancients’ and populated by the Arcanic descendants of their half-human children – and the Federation – a human nation-state dominated by witch-nuns who derive their influence from being able to render down the corpses of said Arcanics into magically potent ‘lilium’. Also there are insubstantial projections/ghosts of titanic tentacle-ey monsters that wander across the landscape sometimes. And a genocidal war ended in a stalemate a decade ago after a city was destroyed by something that no one on either side understands. Oh an in addition to the anthromorphic animal Ancients there’s also just normal cats, except they’re sapient and capable of speech and also necromancy. The book really throws you into things and a decent chunk of the first volume is just introducing and establishing the rules of the world.

The actual plot follows Maika Halfwold, an Arcanic who can pass for human except for the giant occult tattoo on her chest. The story follows her abandoning her girlfriend and voluntarily getting herself enslaved and brought to the mansion/mad science laboratory of a powerful witch-nun so she can break out, fight her way through it, and interrogate her at gunpoint for information about the giant gaps in her memory of when as a child her mother worked with the witch on an archaeological dig. Things escalate from there due to a shard of an enchanted mask and an eldritch abomination that had been slumbering with Maika’s body who is awoken by it. The balance of the volume is spent with her, an incredibly untrustworthy cat, and a vulpine arcanic child who she more or less accidentally rescued from slavery as they try to escape the manhunt after them.

So there’s a lot here, and I really do love almost all of it. Most obviously, the art is just gorgeous – I mean, I’m an easy sell on dieselpunk/fantasy 20s stuff, but genre trappings aside the detail and use of colour is just incredible, and even the less detailed panels do an amazing job capturing expressions and emotion. Basically every aspect of character and environmental design is just very deliberate as well – aesthetics reflect character, and scenes are full of little background details that help sell and fill in the world. But fundamentally just very pretty, an aesthetic pleasure to behold.

Of course, one of the things a whole page of artistic flourishing is devoted to is a flashback of Maika – a starving enslaved orphan during the war – eating the stomach of another child who’d died before her to keep herself going. This is a book that just about exults in brutality and brokenness – ‘there is more hunger in the world than love’ is basically the tagline of the entire volume. This is a world on the verge of a genocidal total war, rife with slavery and human sacrifice, and it pulls absolutely no punches about depicting that (so, so many dead children). With, like, one-three exceptions everyone is flawed and compromised and betrays something they care about when their backs are against the wall. You really and truly can’t trust anyone.

You can see this clearly with Maika herself. She’s just, genuinely an incredibly unpleasant person to be around. Responds to feeling unsure or anxious by lashing out, all but incapable of showing affection in any legible way, too wrapped up in her own mountains of bullshit to even notice what anyone around her has going on until it’s shoved right in her face, paranoid and suspicious and more comfortable with violence than uncertainty, has 100% gotten people killed multiple times due to lack of ability to get over her own (mountains, abyssal, soul-crushing) trauma – really the list just goes on. In her defence basically everyone is actually out to get her (sadly the paranoia and suspicion do not in any way actually make her more difficult to deceive or betray). Anyway, I obviously love her, and the supporting cast is very nearly as good.

Just, generally this is not a series where suffering is ennobling – fear and shame and trauma and a desperate need to cling onto what power or privilege you can drive people as much or more as sympathy for or solidarity with others going through the same things they have. The fact that the Federation is run by a bunch of genocidal religious fanatics doesn’t mean the Ancients ruling the Arcanic Courts are good, or even necessarily that they care about the lives of their subjects beyond their own power and pleasure. It could easily tip over the edge into monochrome nihilism, but it actually manages to toe the line very well.

Though like, despite everything I just said, it does do the oddly common modern genre fic thing where there’s brutal unsparing depictions of colonial plunder and oppression but also everyone’s an intersectional feminist. Not as much as some, but the race-war is between humans and arcanics with no one seeming to care on whit about intraspecies ethnicity or race, and the setting is matriarchal in the modern implicit glass ceiling way a modern American corporation is patriarchal, not the way a midcentury warlord state or fascist empire is patriarchal (not that this means there aren’t graphic threats of rape or depictions of what’s clearly sex slavery just that being the one holding the lash isn’t really gendered).

So yeah, overall happy to report that the first volume of this still absolutely and entirely holds up – and considered as a work on its own the first volume really coheres far better than I’d realized when I was first reading this in one mad rush. Very much looking forward to continuing on to volume 2.