Notes

Honestly, as soon as I had managed to get through the end of the book – or, actually, at the point of the whole melodrama about Alec’s ‘death’, when I had to put away the book for a while and look at the Amazon reviews to see if other people had read the same weirdly bad-fanfic-like book as me or if I was going crazy (I thought Mrs. Flewelling and Robin Hobb were friends? How come she didn’t learn how to write a death scene from her that really makes you believe for a second she would kill off one of her main characters? “Fool’s Fate” is the only book that ever made me cry. This one just made me roll my eyes. “I chose you” – bullshit, the kid was never in any danger of getting killed, so protecting Seregil was only logical, not some huge emotional choice. And “he really is a blessing”, my ass – if it wasn’t for Sabrahn’s creation, Alec wouldn’t even be in Plenimar. Undoing the negative side effects of the prophesy is not an overall plus in the scales, in my opinion. Nor was it any surprise that the little deus ex machina could revive people; that had been telegraphed for half of the book. I call him DeM for his suspense-ruining, virtually cost-free power level, not for the surprise of his intervention. Why should I worry about anything going badly wrong as long as he’s around to fix it?)

Anyway, in the week before I could bring myself to slog through the last few pages just for completion’s sake, I had already made up an AU in my head that might work better with the storyline and characters I had just reread in the first 3 books. I couldn’t stop myself – I was a Doctor Who fan, and that kind of discontinuity AU headcanon-writing has been necessary for years in that fandom, for similar plot continuity break / character-assassination reason. (Though Doctor Who really takes the gold medal in malicious retconning by one writer to destroy the characters of another and, presumably, get some of the older, more critical fans to give up on the show and go away.) It’s become a kind of emotional self defense reaction so I can at least keep enjoying the earlier stories without thinking of all the reasons why I came to dislike the characters for their later actions. Thankfully, while this kind of denial is unhealthy regarding real people (“He’s always been such a nice boy, he can’t have done that…”), I see no problem with it in terms of fiction, other than that fans of the book like you will probably tell me I’m arrogant for presuming I can do better – or at least less offensive – than the original author. And since there were at least a few people in the Amazon reviews who were similarly disappointed as me – though mainly just for style / continuity reasons, not the things that really pissed me off – I kinda want to share that AU. (Along with some canon-compliant fantasizing about the 2 year gap that I didn’t write down back then out of respect for the author’s wishes.) Again from Doctor Who, I know that simply knowing that other fans are similarly heartbroken and angry at the ruining of their favorite story can be cathartic, and that some can’t come up with fanwank-y alternative interpretations and plot-lines as easily as I can.

(I think that “you will father a child of no woman” is a shamefully missed opportunity to introduce a trans character, for example. Especially with access to the kind of magic already introduced in the first 3 books making gender transitioning kind of possible even without modern medicine. I don’t like the usual sort of fetishized mpreg nonsense you get in slash fanfic, but if it serves to help trans visibility and some discussion about abortion rights, I think it’s worth going there. Similarly, I think Ilar as an agent provocateur in Zengat, trying to disrupt the slave trade for the good of all Aurenen on orders of Ulan, who’s trying to stop it without going to war with Plenimar - that implication from “Traitor’s Moon” had interesting possibilities. I can easily keep the parts of Seregil’s character development in regards to Ilar that I liked. After all, assuming Ulan wasn't involved in Seregil's downfall, then Ilar really only followed orders from his own clan superiors, as atui demands, so even if he really came to like Seregil, he had to choose betraying his friend over betraying his clan and did what his entire culture told him he had to do. He can even have spent a decade or two as a slave in Plenimar after just simply getting captured by raiders as a legally unprotected outcast on the run, therefore holding a grudge against Seregil for making it necessary to run, and then he can owe Ulan loyalty because he bought him free. As long as I don’t characterize him as an abusive sociopath, I can easily twist all this mess to Seregil grudgingly helping him to regain some of his own honor, to make up for his own part in ruining the man's life. After Alec has stopped him attacking Ilar on first sight, because they need a guide if they want to spy on Plenimaran soil.)