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If I understand correctly, medieval French folk tales considered chestnut-colored horses to be deceitful and tricky; the Old French word for a chestnut or dun horse was fauvel, and so the Old French expression correier fauvel, literally "to brush the chestnut horse", meant lying or being hypocritical for personal gain. This turned into "curry favel" in 15th-century English, and then mutated into "curry favor" over the next few centuries as people forgot about the horse.

So "currying favor" is really "brushing the Horse of Lies", and the reason you can't curry goodwill, or love, or hatred, or even disfavor is that we didn't have Horses for those.

I realize, looking back on this post, that regular readers of my blog may have thought I made this up. Making up a ridiculous etymology is certainly the sort of thing I might do; in fact I've been meaning to start a sideblog dedicated solely to sufficiently accurate etymologies, and have a notebook with dozens of them jotted down, I just haven't had the time to do anything with them.

But I want to stress that this is not one of those cases. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the very real etymology of the phrase "curry favor".

The Old French fauve or falve referred to the light-brown color that's sometimes called "fallow" in modern English, but since it also sounded similar to faux, meaning "false", it was also associated with deceit and trickery ; the idiom estriller Fauvel literally meant "to groom the fallow one" but idiomatically meant "to lie or trick people".

Then in the 1300s we get the French poem Roman de Fauvel, a satirical poem about a fauve horse, whose name is derived both from the color and from the fact that FAVVEL is an acronym of Flaterie, Avarice, Vilanie, Varieté, Envie, Lascheté (Flattery, Greed, Vileness, Fickleness, Envy, and Cowardice) - all the different vices that this horse embodies.

Fauvel (purportedly modeled after Enguerrand de Marigny [source], an advisor to King Philip IV) is a sinful, conniving, and very rich horse who has various religious and secular leaders fawning over him and brushing him; it was well-known enough that "grooming Fauvel" came to mean "sucking up to someone powerful" more than just "being evil", and when it was translated into English the grooming was translated as currying, which specifically is grooming a horse with a curry comb [wiktionary]. From this we got the Middle English expression "currying Fauvel", which then mutated via folk etymology (in the "reinterpretation of unfamiliar words as more familiar ones" sense, not the "people are wrong about etymology" sense) into "currying favor".

Curry favor in:

Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry_favor

Merriam-Webster: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curry%20favor

ID: [a screenshot of a news headline that says "sentenced to 12 years in a mental health facility"] end ID

Harrowhark is keeping her parents in power of the Ninth House by pretending they're alive and taking all kinds of religious vows to avoid talking and eating. At first glance, they look fine because Harrowhark did some forbidden magic to preserve their faces. She messed up the spell though, so don't look at the rest of their bodies.

I think the defining characteristic of my favorite type of horror is a realization of the uncanny: the slow lifting of a mirror up to your face so you can see the crack. I love it when horror stains backward through an entire text. As a horror reader, I’m always tightening up protectively to guess and to guard against that moment, and I want horror to have been sitting in my blind spot the whole time.

—from her Clarkesworld interview

While she used final plot twists very well in The Magician's Apprentice or The Deepwater Bride (here's a guide to her writing outside of TLT), in TLT she is doing something deeper: we begin with Gideon wanting to be a soldier, and given the limited scope of the first book, we accept her framework and run with it. But she always meant to slowly peel back the layers towards Alecto (what became Nona) and have us experience the shock of leaving Niner nobles and God's polycule for normal people in the colonies and experience in our bones the way necro society were always the bad guys (as a system, not necessarily on an individual level—I am very very curious about the fate of the “House formerly known as the Sixth”). The Unwanted Guest also gave us pieces of context that changed everything looking back. Alecto will presumably deconstruct the initial appearances even more.

Defamiliarization or ostranenie (Russian: остранение, IPA: [ɐstrɐˈnʲenʲɪjə]) is the artistic technique of presenting to audiences common things in an unfamiliar or strange way so they could gain new perspectives and see the world differently.

The Wikipedia article on defamiliarization and its links to the Uncanny is very interesting, and frankly the subject is vital if you want to analyze works of fiction. Learning about the Russian formalist definition of metaphor when I was in college rewired my brain.