a genuine kuzu

The psychic horse can take over his body and control his movements and has total power over him in terms of introducing him to the culture and explaining how things work and which people to trust—but this is fine because the horse is Nice

Not only that horse, but all horses: they’re fundamentally Good, therefore we have to trust them

The Valdemar series kinda plays with morality and what counts for good or evil, who is on what side. What the motives are, and what makes control over a person or destiny okay.

The horses are avatars of a god, and are in fact challenged in some books, and admit they make mistakes, and they are not always right.

Like yeah it’s 80s-90s fantasy tropes, it’s chock full of “cringe,” and the writing quality varies from book to book. It’s not High Literature, but it is interesting and fun. There’s gay and trans and ace characters, there’s arguments over whether being raised by “evil” people makes you evil, there’s discussions over religious freedom, over children’s rights, over war, over magic and power and what it means to have power. There’s murder plots and spy plots and save-the-day adventures. There’s stories about what you do after you survive the adventure and are left permanently disabled and not even magic healing or divine intervention can fix you.

There is very much an awareness of the genre Mercedes Lackey is writing in, and the tropes thereof. Yes, we do suffer a bit from those tropes sometimes, but it’s much less tiresome than most of the male authors from that time period. They’re weird little books, but they’re fun, and know they’re written for fun.

Southern Brown Bandicoot (Isoodon obesulus), Eat a tasty nectar from some Banksia, family Paramelidae, order Peramelemorphia, Cranbourne, VIC, Australia