Murphy's Lore

Step right up, but be prepared. Those who fail are poverty-snared. Question One! If your labor proves most fruitful, Raking quarters by the bootful, Who should excess profits reap, Me the wolf or you the sheep? Question Two! If, by merit, you're made pope, What will be your fervent hope? Law and order justly paired? Or mercy and the guilty spared?

Which is annoying to realise, because I did enjoy Iron Widow when I first read it! I'd probably enjoy it again if I reread it! I willingly bought the sequel and enjoyed that too! But it somehow manages to be at times glacially paced and way, way too fast.

To sketch that out a little more clearly:

In Chapter 1, we get Zetian's initial motivation (become a concubine pilot for Yang Guang, avenge her sister by killing her), we set up her relationship with Yinzhi, we get ... a lot of exposition, but that's a known hazard and it's worked in well enough that it fairly deftly avoids the Concepts Tax.

And then in Chapter 2 and 3, nothing happens at all. We learn Zetian's family is shitty, we have it reiterated that Zetian and Yinzhi have a kind of romance going on, and that's it.

Then we skip over the process of her becoming a concubine pilot entirely, which remember is the first part of her master plan, and jump straight to the aftermath. We get about a chapter of, again, nothing happening, and then in the span of like five short chapters, which are each about half the length of a regular fantasy novel's chapters, she 1) Meets Yang Guang, 2) Almost has sex with him, only for it to immediately be interrupted by 3) Alien mechas attacking, leading to 4) Zetian semi-accidentally killing Yang Guang with her mind and then 5) Single-handedly fending off the attack, after which we get 6) Zetian being assigned as concubine pilot for Li Shimin.

So, an introductory chapter, literally all momentum dying for two chapters, skipping over the first major hurdle in her plan, still no momentum, and then the entirety of the rest of her plan which is her sole character motivation in four chapters, and one chapter for the aftermath. By one-fifth of the way through the book, Zetian has achieved her goal with minimal complications, and she doesn't even really intend to. Her goal from then on becomes 'survive,' even though she went into this plan fully expecting to be executed anyway so this is really just a slightly prolonged version of that.

And like. This is clearly done to get us to the introduction of Li Shimin, one of the two main love interests, faster. Zetian needs to be Li Shimin's concubine pilot for that plotline to work, and the author wants Zetian to be in a position where she's hated and feared for killing her pilot, and clearly there was an attitude there that the Yang Guang murder plot is basically just the delivery system to get Zetian to those plotlines. But if you rotate the pieces of the plot just a little, you can actually have your cake and eat it too.

Like, here's a way that plot could be structured:

-- Zetian wants to become Yang Guang's concubine pilot to get close enough to murder him.

-- Zetian undertakes the concubine pilot tests, and part of it is test-piloting with one of the prince pilot applicants. She's paired with someone fairly important -- it's a plot-relevant point that the sons of high-ranking nobles aren't ever conscripted as pilots, so that needs to stay in, but there's a lot of shades of 'important' that aren't outright 'son of a high-ranking noble.'

-- During this test-piloting, Zetian sees Yang Guang for the first time, watching the test. She has a pretty understandable trauma response, he murdered her sister and all that, and accidentally kills her partner with her mind.

-- Zetian's plan is now in shambles. There's no way they'll let her pilot with Yang Guang now. Surprisingly, they don't kill her immediately, but they do pair her with Li Shimin, which in the book as it stands and here too is basically a death sentence, because Shimin's raw power kills all his partners.

-- Of course, Zetian does not die. Like in the book as it is, she is actually perfectly matched for power with Shimin (okay, in the book, she's not actually, it's revealed later the concubine pilot chairs suppress their power to protect the prince pilots -- and that's thematically important, so it stays in).

-- Instead of Zetian completing her plan and then her motivation switching to survival when she always intended to die after getting her revenge, Zetian now has to survive. She hasn't gotten her revenge yet, so she needs to survive long enough to kill Yang Guang.

But structurally it is also kind of a mess for adjacent but reversed reasons to Iron Widow.

Iron Widow's first act is extremely rushed and has minimal bearing on the rest of the story because she completes her goals effortlessly within them. Unsouled does a better job of carrying its motivations through the book (non-magic-guy in an everyone-has-magic society wants magic), but like Iron Widow, nothing in the first act really has a bearing on the rest of the narrative, and unlike Iron Widow its first act is 45% of the book.

So to give a quick summary: In Unsouled, we pick up with Lindon, a guy who as a child was named Unsouled because he has barely any ability to harvest aura and cycle madra, which is the basis of all magic in this world. Lindon, now a teenager but functionally the same as a mediocre 10 year old in this society's magic system rankings, desperately wants to grow stronger and overcome what is by his society's standards a disability. We start off with him taking a spirit fruit to try and boost his power, and progress through to the tournament at the end of the first act, which is interrupted by the exiled Grand Patriarch of a rival clan returning to the valley, declaring his intent to conquer it, murdering Lindon and a bunch of others, and then all of that being undone by a time-manipulating martial artist from space, who shows Lindon that even if the timeline proceeds as normal, he and everyone he knows will die in about 28 years.

So, there is an issue with that, and the brief summary above doesn't cover it, which is that a lot happens in this first act, and 90% of it has zero bearing on the rest of the book. The internal politics of Lindon's clan? It doesn't matter after the 45% mark. Lindon's relationship with his family? Not really important after that mark either, since he leaves. The Grand Patriarch? Well, in what I think was probably meant to be a subversion of tropes but is actually just a subversion of coherent narrative, he is introduced, established as a threat, and then effortlessly dealt with by an outside force, after which he is never seen or indeed mentioned again.

So -- this is pointless. The only thing we get from the first act is that Lindon has no powers but wants them, a remark from a sacred fox that he could develop his own magic path, and the trickery he uses to go to the school that forms the second act -- although that has pacing problems too which I'm not going to go into right now. Everything about the internal politics of the valley is irrelevant after the first act and will become even more irrelevant in Book 2, since he's now left the valley.

And worse, the first act is filled with what are essentially False Plots, plotlines which either never come to anything or are ultimately dropped. A Wei sacred beast tells Lindon he can have a Path manual if he defeats a Copper at a tournament -- but by the time Lindon finishes the tournament, beating an Iron, he no longer wants that manual. There are intra-clan rivalries amongst the Wei that lead to Wei having to learn a madra-disrupting move to try to survive in a duel, but after that the rivalry stops being important.

Compare and contrast, say, Jim Butcher's Furies of Calderon, a book that is in premise very similar to that first act. It follows Tavi, a boy who can't wield elemental spirits called furies in a world where everyone else can, in his parochial life in a valley separated from the wider world. Like Unsouled, a lot of emphasis is placed on the politics of the valley, and how Tavi doesn't fit into those politics because he's -- effectively disabled. Like Unsouled, Furies of Calderon never leaves the valley -- 'and now we'll leave the valley' is the sequel hook.

Furies of Calderon, however, has every plot thread carry from beginning to end: The valley's politics, the intrusion of wider imperial politics, the fact that the valley serves as a buffer against foreign invasion, Tavi's lack of magic, and so on. Its first act is actually the same length as Unsouled's first act, 45% of the book, but everything in it remains relevant.

Or take The Poppy War by RF Kuang, a book which is vaguely similar in concept. We pick up with Rin, a teenage girl who wants to get into Sinegard, a prestigious, ancient school for warriors. Rin isn't disabled in the way Lindon and Tavi are, but she's at an extreme social disadvantage -- nobody from her province has ever gone to Sinegard before, and Sinegard almost exclusively takes the children of powerful nobles who have studied for the entrance exams all their life with specialised tutors. Like Unsouled, the second act of The Poppy War takes place at this school.

The Poppy War's first act is 5% of the book. Two chapters. We learn why Rin wants to go to Sinegard so desperately, we learn the disadvantage she's at and the tremendously unhealthy (which is plot relevant) ways she tries to counteract that, and we briefly see the exam. It is extremely economical, because the RF Kuang knows most of these plot threads aren't going to be carried past it -- the two big ones, Rin's social disadvantage and her driven but self-destructive nature, are what most of those two chapters are about.

So, here's how I think Unsouled's first act could be adjusted:

-- Everything about Suriel is cut. She's a cool character, but she doesn't really do much of anything. Her one scene of presence in the plot is actively detrimental to it, as she removes the biggest threat in the narrative from play, erases everyone's memories of it, and then drops in plot threads which will not become relevant in this book or even really be mentioned again more than once or twice.

-- Instead, have Lindon start with getting the spirit fruit, as always, but this time his goal is always to go to the Heaven's Glory school by winning against someone much higher ranked than him at the tournament. These are places highly reputed for producing powerful sacred arts users, he thinks that they can help him, but he's stymied by his disability and the cultural restrictions that come with it.

-- You then be liberal with cutting elements to get to the tournament within one or two chapters. Lindon's sister trying to progress to Iron? Cut. She's already an Iron. Intra-clan rivalries amongst the Wei? Cut it, it won't matter. The finer points of Lindon trying and failing to find anything he can use? Cut.

-- Instead, Lindon's goal is always to defeat an Iron and leverage that into going to Heaven's Glory. We are economical with the first act, covering just the build-up to the tournament and then the tournament itself, where Lindon uses his cunning and traps to eke out a victory.

-- Second act then covers him at the school. This is where he learns the Empty Palm, this is where he meets the Wei sacred beast who suggests forming his own path. While this is going on, there are shenanigans afoot with the Li trying to bring in their Grand Patriarch.

-- He hears about Yerin but doesn't meet her until the end of the second act, and the start of act three, which is also when the Li intensify their efforts to summon their Grand Patriarch. As it turns out, Yerin and her master specifically came to hunt down the Grand Patriarch and stop him, but Yerin's master was killed by the Heaven's Glory elders.

-- Act 3 then covers Lindon and Yerin slowly forming an alliance to both stop the Grand Patriarch and for Yerin to absorb her master's remnant. Act 3 ends with Yerin leaving the valley but warning Lindon that her master told her the valley would be destroyed, and Lindon deciding to go with her, knowing that he's at an even bigger disadvantage in the world outside but also that it's his best way of getting stronger and saving the valley.

And while that wasn't always wives being abused by their husbands -- sometimes it was parents abusing their severely physically or mentally disabled adult children, who couldn't work or live on their own -- there were multiple cases like that, usually with children in the mix. Becoming entirely financially dependent on your spouse is a recipe for disaster, because they can do whatever they like and any recourse you have is stymied by the precarity of your situation.