Shipping pure trash since 1995

so as you probably remember from my excessive freaking out about it, two weeks ago i finished the lymond chronicles and had mixed feelings about the ending. on the one hand these books felt like the best thing i’ve ever read but on the other they left me extremely frustrated. now that the fog is gradually lifting i want to go back and get to the bottom of why the last two books, if i try to take a rational unbiased look at them, missed the mark of my expectations so completely. i will probably make several posts about this and the first one is gonna be about lymond’s identity crisis.

(i wrote this mostly to put my thoughts in order but i’m very interested in your opinions as well, especially if you also felt let down by the ending)

i’ve read your guys’ feedback with great interest and although i’ve changed my mind on some points (lymond’s beef with sybilla being not just about her having children outside of marriage), you didn’t manage to convince me on some others (lymond’s legitimacy being important to his identity). which is why i want to talk some more about his identity, what imo should his identity crisis be about and what we have instead. and no one can stop me bc this is my blog lol

Going from, you know, the chess, into a happy ever after in two books is probably impossible and should not have been attempted, but God I was hoping for something so much messier.

“Gabriel’s voice, it seemed to him, had gone unaccountably flat, and the big man, his guinea-gold hair bright in the torchlight, was looking, not at Lymond’s face pressed to the wood but below….Cut into the fine skin of the breast, the new scar sharp and black in the light, was a crude attempt at an eight sided cross.”

-Disorderly Knights, Pt 3, Ch XIV

Anyway, I hope everyone has a great weekend :)

Pawn in Frankincense: it’s a beautiful day in Constantinople and you are a horrible parent.

The Ringed Castle: it’s a beautiful day in Moscow and you are a horrible military commander with a sick-ass eagle.

let me take you on a journey of one relationship development reflected in manifold creative nicknames :D

(this got very long and the one to blame is lymond. it’s definitely him who can’t shut up, not me. bc succinctness is my middle name🙈)

beautiful, clever, and murderous

beautiful in a specifically androgynous way. sometimes cross dresses for schemes. clever in a particularly conniving and also pretentious way. nobody knows what he's on about. murderous in a... well. people are dead

extremely awful except for the times when he's not and then you realise that like, 50-75% of the awfulness was an act. but the remainder wasn't

is sometimes very very funny. is sometimes very very mean. is sometimes both at once

keeps acquiring new young men who are in love with him and will make bad choices for him. occasionally they even admit it

copes with being sad by getting worse

I think he keeps his vow. To "not fail" someone means to 'do right by them', to try and get the best outcome for them.

(SPOILERS obviously)

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In RC, Lymond reflects that "Of two tainted children, he had chosen to preserve the boy best equipped to survive, who had already won a place in Philippa’s life." If we take as read that Khairedden was Lymond's son... He was SO damaged and weak. He was building a frail and tentative trust in Lymond, but in no-one else. When you remember that Lymond did not expect to survive himself - knowing that even if he did survive, he was broken by the opium addiction, may well never recover from that, and had absolutely zero intention of actually being a father or rejoining his family in Scotland - when it came down to the choice, where would saving Khairedden leave him? Still frail, damaged, possibly beyond recovery anyway, and then abandoned by the one person he was just beginning to trust. I mean. It's heartbreaking any way you look at it.

So, I think - considering the potential outcomes for Khairedden alongside HIMSELF - it could be argued that Lymond kept his vow, to not fail his son. Because maybe, saving his life but then disappearing from it, through death, addiction, or abandonment, would in fact mean failing him. Instead, Lymond chose to remove any further, future pain from him.