Published: December 16, 2017
http://www.mcstories.com/LemmaTheLibrarian/index.html
Here we are, at the absolute nadir of the Lemma series.
Sorry, I can phrase that better. Let’s start over.
Brea is a vampire lord now, apparently, and murders every living thing in the castle except Lemma in a fairly contemptuous “escape”/killing spree. Lemma, Iason, and Iola regroup and try to figure out how to kill her, which goes about as successfully as you might expect. In their second fight, Vamp!Brea is the first person to note out loud how turned on Lemma is by the whole being controlled thing (Lemma, inevitably, denies it). She also drops some dark hints about Lemma being in a position, in the future, to use the Unmaking doom-spell to save the world (or doom it; she’s not exactly a trustworthy source), which is why she’s so interested in Lemma.
The third fight – and I will admit, it’s a nice rule of three lose-lose-win setup, that the other stories mostly haven’t been long enough to manage – ends with Lemma, Iason, and Iola’s victory: they really need to pour it on to kill Vamp!Brea, and there’s just an endless succession of clever new attacks (and a blackly comic refusal of Vamp!Brea to actually die). Iola joins the team, and we’re finally off the Tin Islands!
So, like the curate’s egg, parts of this are really quite good. Honestly the last two thirds or so are pretty well done; not very hot*, but interesting and a decent sequence of fight scenes. It’s the opening that really pisses me off. In order from least to most important:
– Vamp!Brea is an asshole. She’s a villain, obviously, but I’ll take a character turning out to be a villain before turning out to be a terrfying asshole any day. For whatever reason, the former feels like the character’s tricked me; the latter feels like the author’s tricked me. “You thought Brea’s adventures in Mercia were charming and fun? Don’t you feel stupid now!” Which brings me to:
– It fucks up “Sucker For a Good Book”. Yes, my theory at the end of that review was never not going to be headcanon, and in retrospect obviously that story was planned with this reveal in mind. It still retroactively trivializes what, on its own, is a pretty charming little story.
– It really, really fucks up “The Glamour-ous Life of a Slave”. This is where the rubber hits the road. Lemma’s rescue of the women of Castle Brinksmoor is arguably the most important thing she’s done in her whole time on the Tin Islands. She rescued a whole bunch of women from a pretty nasty fate, and since then we’ve been having periodic reminders that they’re still kicking around, trying to do the best for themselves and each other, making their own way in the world.
Also now they’re all fucking dead. To prove the situation’s serious, and demonstrate the dangerousness of a villain whose danger is frankly pretty clear (and, also, who is dead within 6000 words – it’s not even setting up the big bad of the second half). It leaves a really scuzzy taste in my mouth: frankly, it feels like a mass Fridging.
Ugnh. Iola’s onboard, Lemma has learned the spell of unmaking and has a terrifying possible destiny involving it before her, all three of them are leaving the Tin Islands. Done. Whatever else you can say about the next one, it’s much, much less serious than this.
*Both Ardatlili and Vamp!Brea are, in my opinion, too scarily psychopathic to be sexy. I’d make more of this except that @midorikonton has always been plenty upfront about writing maledom fiction, and if I’d prefer more, and more sympathetic, femdom sequences, well, that’s really on me, not her. “You knew I was a
snakemaledom writer when you took me in.”When The Fuck Are We? 🤷
The obvious answer is to rely on things that aren’t documentation: archaeology, for instance. It’s rather hard, from the scanty documentation of post-Roman Britain alone, to distinguish “records didn’t survive much” from “civilizational collapse”, but archaeology can provide evidence and hoo boy was the late fifth century bad for Britain. We’re talking no indications of trade over distances as far as a dozen kilometres. We’re talking housing regressing, not just to huts, but all the way to “pits scraped in the ground with debris on top”. An actual, historically accurate King Arthur movie would look less like that crappy 2004 Kiera Knightley vehicle, and more like Mad Max, in spirit at least. None of that can be garnered from the literary record.
But archaeology also has huge limitations – to keep going with the matter of Britain, the invasions of the Anglo-Saxons and their subsequent conversion to Christianity, both hugely important to the future of the island, would be very difficult to pick up in the archaeological record if we didn’t know where and when to look. The Roman Empire switched wholesale from cremation to inhumation in the second century, the kind of evidence that would prompt lots of theories about religious upheaval if we didn’t have period literature indicating that there was no particular reason, it was just one of those changes in fashion that happen to societies from time to time. Ideally, we need to take advantage of all the evidence we can find, to produce the best picture we can. So what to do about scanty and biased sources?
In the 12th C CE, a Catholic heresy called Catharism became very popular in Languedoc (southern France)*. In 1209, Pope Innocent III declared a crusade against them – the first crusade not directly aimed at the Holy Land – and for two decades crusaders ravaged Languedoc with fire and the sword. That wasn’t enough for the Papacy**, of course, so what is now called the Inquisition was set up for the very first time to root out any remaining gone-to-ground Cathars. The Inquisition, whatever its popular image today is, was at its core a giant, grinding judicial system, and as it chewed through towns and villages in Languedoc, it produced a vast quantity of court records: enough that some of them have survived to the present day.
In the 1970s, a French historian named Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie began working with a chunk of these documents and in 1975 produced a book (“Montaillou: an Occitan village, from 1294 to 1324”) about one particular village in Foix, which was the subject of intense inquisitorial attention in the 1310s. Ladurie’s insight*** was that one could use these court and interrogation records to build a picture of the village, by looking at the stuff that comes up in passing. Who were the landowners, who were the dispossessed, what were their relationships with each other. Who feuded with who; who was having an affair with who. Folk customs. Legal battles. Crop yields. Material possessions. Just about the only thing that isn’t covered deeply by the book (although it’s the focus of the primary documents) is who in the village, exactly, was a Cathar; because on that subject uniquely the inquisitors and villagers are both very motivated parties. Everything else is up for grabs.
Obviously, not every historian can get volume after volume of interview transcripts for whatever period they like; but the basic insight – try and look at your documents from the side – is applicable very widely. After critical analysis in the more general sense, it’s probably the most useful tool in the historian’s toolbox. So, to return to Britain. Looking at the Y Gododdin and saying “yes, this is an accurate account of the battle at which Gododdin was conquered by Northumbria” is probably a bad idea. But that doesn’t mean it’s useless. It tells us lots of things, in passing: what was valued by this culture, what people were honoured and shamed for; what they ate, what they wore, how they fought. And even if the central battle is fictionalized or embellished or completely fabricated, the fact that was a plausible story tells us that battles of the time really were three- or four-hundred to a side, and at that scale could decide the fate of kingdoms.
So that’s my little tangent into historical technique. Next time the plot moves rather less forward but the characters start travelling, so I can return to the ostensible purpose of this section. 😉
*Catharism nowadays is probably best known via The Da Vinci Code, which educates people that… uh… It relies on real history, such as… um… The Da Vinci Code is correct that Catharism existed.
**Or the king of France, who basically took over Languedoc in one step via expropriations from heretical nobles.
***Other people undoubtedly had the same insight before him. I’m telling a story, ok?
~
Next time: Regular service is resumed. Lemma has an adventure with pirates, and I talk about pirates.
…yeah. It’s a mass fridging, it’s true, it’s a problem–and by the time I realized that’s what was going on, I’d already written myself into a corner. :/<br><br>
Which is no excuse.<br><br>
As for Ardatlili and Brea… I dunno. I agree that Brea’s violence (not to mention general disinterest in sex) made this a hard chapter to get any heat out of. But I’m not sure there’s a meaningful difference between what Ardatlili does and what the various male mind controllers are trying to? At least for me. YMMV.<br><br>
It’s an interesting point about revealing a character is an asshole vs revealing they’re a villain. I’ll have to think on that one.
Thanks as always for the review!