Dear Brother-in-arms (non-homoerotic),
First of all, your previous email found me a bit drunk on a Friday night, so yesterday I ended up lightly editing my reply a bit and adding a couple of new side points in an effort to make myself more coherent, if you're interested. I guess you had already started writing up the reply while I was doing that :'D
The funny thing about Oonagh in QP is that on my first read I absolutely couldn't tell that Francis and her were interested in each other - like you, I guess after Christian I was expecting the romantic subplots to be tenderer, and I was also expecting a more traditional/generic plot structure where she was "assigned" as love interest to O'Liamroe. And I also liked O'Liamroe quite a bit and wanted him to be happy!
Oonagh gets a sort of Greek tragedy death where she's destroyed by her own flaws and I think this is the case for most of the deaths in Lymond. I think she'd also been spiraling into mental illness since the end of QP so on a reread I can see why she was not acting very rationally, but at this point in the series it did stick out to me against all the cunning chessmaster types because I just couldn't understand where her storyline was going. She also has a bit of a third sight and now we're at the part where that sort of thing vaguely matters in the series, so we could also analyze her attitudes towards predetermination and fate and whatnot, for better or for worse.
But mostly her POV is tricky because she seems to always be drowning in her own emotions and passions and resentments, she seems cool and detached on the outside so you get nothing from her, but on the inside she's sort of constantly overwhelmed by herself. A couple of years ago I made a post about how funny it is that a woman who's constantly being metaphorically equated with the sea, the ocean, etc... turns out to be unable to swim and needs Francis to help her not drown. She's literally drowning in herself.
I think Marthe is another tricky one to understand because while she's a relatively one-note character with themes that reflect many other characters' themes (she's angry at the injustice of her sex, station, circumstances, etc.), she also... has some context on Lymond and how he's connected to her that the reader and the other characters don't. So Marthe, at least to me, is really a lot more comprehensible in hindsight.
Philippa thinks about herself in circles because she really wants to have control over the narrative of what kind of person she is, but she too is missing key insights about herself. There's a memorable sequence later on when she spends a whole chapter working herself up into a lather because somebody said something about her which to her is obviously and distressingly not true, only to end up forced to admit to herself that it is true 10 pages later.
I especially love it when she compares herself to Kate in her own head and how it contrasts with what Kate thinks about herself - the first thing we learn about Kate is that she hates being called sensible, the second thing we learn about Kate is that she is sensible. Philippa has built her entire sense of self on being sensible like her mother but, like... Look at her actions. Look at where her life is 😂 Her characterization is also very... stealthy, because she's actually quite brilliant at most of the things she does, especially for her age, but because this is casually slipped into the narrative and not remarked upon, her development often comes out of left field to some readers. I'm 10% into my PiF reread and we've already seen her play several instruments, successfully manipulate several people for information, get into a physical altercation, decisively win at dice against grown men... She's a menace :) It's also interesting how a lot of the stuff she gets into parallels Francis's life in a way, except this time Francis is there to put his finger on the scales. But I'll say more about that when you finish PiF!
I don't much regret Joleta died from a storytelling perspective because I feel like we've seen her entire behavioral repertoire, there isn't much she could do by staying in the narrative that we hadn't already seen and it'd get repetitive. Whether you liked that she's sadistic or that she has a bratty childish vaguely BDSM dynamic with Francis, another character will fill that void, dw :) and the next book features another potential Joleta baby daddy, so she lives on in people's love for her lmfao!
It's funny that you say that DK was slow for you because I always saw it as the simplest and shortest and most easy-going of the books. She just races through the plot and large chunks of the developing dynamics between the characters are summarized instead of shown. PiF I always perceived as beautifully dense and long exactly because it has so much going on, and it spends so much time building up to each event, I feel like half the book is just an excruciating lead up to some horrifying event or other.
And it has so many tonally disparate elements too - believe it or not, this is a book where all the surviving single people get married, despite also being a book with basically zero romance, unless you count whatever Jerott has going on with everyone around him as romance. This makes it feel really full to me, basically at the end of the book the characters are such a long way from where they were at the start it feels like a century has passed. And the range is insane, not many writers can go "this sexy bisexual twink gets into hilarious interpersonal drama because he's too Catholic to put the moves on his toxic best guy friend, so he puts the moves on a woman who may or may not be his secret bastard sister instead! Hope you enjoyed this fun interlude! And now! Back to the harrowing plotline with the toddler prostitutes!" and make it cohere.
kianamaiart
dededos
areudirty
annaxmalina
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
