I don't understand me sometimes
Mar. 11th, 2019 10:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conulyI was at The Strand yesterday looking for an ARC of a particular book that Eva is very excited about, and nothing doing. I did, however, find an ARC of a particular book that *I* am very excited about, and so I bought it.
And today, instead of reading it, I re-read Swordheart and then The Empress of Timbra. (I was a little weak in my praise of it when I posted about it, that latter book, and given that I've now read it three times I think I ought to have recommended it more strongly. It may be a standard European fantasy scene, but there's no plot-consuming love triangles or strings of implausible coincidences, and that's worth a lot, honestly, even if when "potatoes" come up I have to, as I habitually do in this sort of story, mentally edit them to "turnips". It's only one mention, anyway.)
Anyway, back to Swordheart, it's interesting to me that Sarkis spends a lot of time angsting about whether or not Halla might feel coerced if he tried to express his attraction to her, but at no point does anybody apparently think or suggest to him that, in fact, there's a power imbalance that goes the other way. The only thing we know he's compelled to do is physically defend the sword's wielder from injury or death, and the fact that one previous wielder resorted to cutting out his tongue to get him to shut up suggests that he's not magically compelled to follow orders (or at least not ones that have nothing to do with fighting or guarding, we're still unclear on that part)... but the fact that this asshole was able to do it also suggests that he couldn't have just run off until he poofed back into the vicinity of the sword and then started running again. I'd think that all the characters just happened to overlook it, but it reads more like Ursula Vernon overlooked it, and I'm not sure how she did that.
And today, instead of reading it, I re-read Swordheart and then The Empress of Timbra. (I was a little weak in my praise of it when I posted about it, that latter book, and given that I've now read it three times I think I ought to have recommended it more strongly. It may be a standard European fantasy scene, but there's no plot-consuming love triangles or strings of implausible coincidences, and that's worth a lot, honestly, even if when "potatoes" come up I have to, as I habitually do in this sort of story, mentally edit them to "turnips". It's only one mention, anyway.)
Anyway, back to Swordheart, it's interesting to me that Sarkis spends a lot of time angsting about whether or not Halla might feel coerced if he tried to express his attraction to her, but at no point does anybody apparently think or suggest to him that, in fact, there's a power imbalance that goes the other way. The only thing we know he's compelled to do is physically defend the sword's wielder from injury or death, and the fact that one previous wielder resorted to cutting out his tongue to get him to shut up suggests that he's not magically compelled to follow orders (or at least not ones that have nothing to do with fighting or guarding, we're still unclear on that part)... but the fact that this asshole was able to do it also suggests that he couldn't have just run off until he poofed back into the vicinity of the sword and then started running again. I'd think that all the characters just happened to overlook it, but it reads more like Ursula Vernon overlooked it, and I'm not sure how she did that.
