It's too bad tumblr doesn't seem to talk all that much about the 'Edge Chronicles' by Paul Steward and Chris Riddell, with the foundational book being 'Beyond the Deepwoods'. There would be so much to get into, it remains one of the most impactful fantasy worlds for me, but today I just wanna talk about this little gem:
The strange cliff continent of the "Edge" is home to thousands of sophont races, many of them humanoid. Predictably, our pov characters are usually "fourthlings", the most recognizably human-like species.
The termagant trogs are an interesting culture within the series, providing some important characters for the story. They are a reclusive matriarchal race dwelling in caves underneath the deepwoods. The shortest way to describe their biology in contrast to the fourthlings is that they have both severe sex dimorphism and undergo a metamorphosis between their juvenile and adult stages.
Young female termagant trogs are a larval stage that invariably looks like Merida, from 'Brave' - long red-orange hair, fair skin, blue eyes, slender feminine form - and are considered by fourthlings, certainly our male pov characters, to be exceptionally beautiful. However, once they come of age, a ritual called the "Blooding" (subtle), involving the sap of a carnivorous oak tree, triggers their metamorphosis into their ultimate "termagant" form: an absolutely gigantic butch woman, perfectly bald and packed with muscles and a fameously choleric temperament. They usually elect to cover their entire bodies with elaborate tattoos, and usually one of their first acts, as a rite of passage, is to violently destroy all of their childhood toys... and murder their pets, to let go of their weak attachments and fully embrace the sisterhood as the only company they need.
Now, there is obviously a lot to unpack here (this is a blatant metaphor, but for what exactly; it reads like a mirror parody of how boys are turned into men in a patriarchal society; how self-aware are the authors, exactly, of the feelings and preconceptions and attitude towards women that went into their writing here; etc.).
But maybe we can start with the fact that the metamorphosis is not inevitable - if the vital component of the blood sap is missing, then young termagants may end up stuck in their juvenile form forever, indistinguishable from fourthlings except that they never age. What I want to talk about today is how characters in the story have vastly different perspectives on this. Fourthlings consider it a stroke of luck, thinking that the young termagant has dodged a bullet, escaped a horrible fate, and now gets to remain "pretty" forever. Termagant girls however consider their lives to be ruined, if they miss the ritual: they think of the gigantic butch form as their "true selves", yearn for the community of the sisterhood, and see the ritual as the happiest moment in their lives. It is as if a human was stuck in the body of a baby or a toddler, forever.
A lot can be made of the little detail that the story and world building comes from a (cishet) man, but what sticks with me after all of these years is that contrast of perception, and how the story deals with it. Yes, the male pov characters are horrified by the termagant life cycle and always shocked when they learn that the termagant girls in their life find the transformation and ogre-like state to be aspirational. But crucially, they never say that out loud. We are privy to their inner thoughts, but they never, ever try to talk the girl out of it. They do not challenge her dysphoria, do not question her yearning, her cultural values and her sorrow.
So ultimately the most important thing to take away from this may be that the authors articulate confusion and a degree of horror at the transformation, and the real world things to which it may serve as a metaphor, in a way that may read as fairly ignorant and ugly to you, but they also don't question how much it means to those characters, and the real world people they stand for. It all boils down to
"I don't get it. But I don't have to. It's real to her."
(And in case of a completed ritual: "And now I better get the fuck out of here".)
