#falcio

Hey, friends!

One thing I'm very, very excited about with A DREAM OF SWORDS (in its last week on Kickstarter!) is that one of my favorite contemporary authors, Sebastien de Castell, has written its introduction, an essay about the outsized impact that swords have on the popular imagination.

If you haven't read his GREATCOATS series, I really love it. It's a great high adventure swashbuckling fantasy, and it's got some stellar audiobook narrations by Joe Jameson. There's a very good chance that your library has them, and if not, they're on Audible or you can find links to the retailer of your choice through his website. There's heavy, gritty subject matter, and sometimes ain't for the squeamish, but unlike some darker fantasy stuff there's an undercurrent of hope and idealism that permeates the whole thing. I'm a sucker for idealism in fiction and I can think of few folks in modern times that have done it better than has Sebastien (another top contender is Avatar: The Last Airbender).

(the above is my attempt to capture the lead of the book, Falcio, and his two best friends/brothers-in-arms).

Me:

But like he really saw the biggest motherfucker in the ring and was like ‘oh yeah, it’s that one. That’s the chief’ as though he hasn’t been having his ass deceived and handed to him by Trin for nearly the past three books. Like you would think he would’ve learned by then that the villain was never who he thought it was. Or at least be able to sense bastard vibes from a mile away but nah. Nah nah

Sim: Sometimes he walks.

It was Aline who replied, “When the dying is all that’s left, Falcio, it makes all the difference in the world.”

I do believe that Falcio loved Paelis, but I don’t think it was in a romantic way. I’d definitely submit to the argument he had an infatuation though. Falcio’s love for Paelis seemed to stem more from admiration and respect than anything else. Paelis was something untouchable, an ideal, he represented what Falcio wanted and so he put him on a pedestal for it.

If you think about it, Paelis was the first person to believe in Falcio and he was the one who dragged him tooth and nail out of his berserking phase. He showed Falcio a future that he could get behind, and he helped Falcio to realize that not all nobility are bad people - granted, the GRAND majority of them are, but there is still hope and that was what mattered. And if he can’t change the Dukes then he can change their suffocating influence/control over the people. Which at the end of the day was what Falcio wanted. He wanted justice for all the injustice he’d lived through, what with his own family, and what happened to Aline, and how that Duke and his men weren’t punished for what they did to her. Paelis was the first person to help him realize that was possible. And he wanted that justice so badly he idealized it, he stuck to it because it was the only thing that mattered after he lost everything that had mattered to him - and since Paelis could make that kind of world possible he was worth knowing and defending.

There’s no doubt that Paelis and Falcio had a relatively intimate relationship (they did see each other at their lowest points after all) but I think that at the end of the day the two were too different from each other to be romantically involved. There was love there, no doubt, there’s textual evidence of it lol, but I don’t think Paelis could romantically fall in love with someone who was as much of a wildcard as Falcio was. And I think Falcio was too in love with the IDEA of Paelis and what he represented than he was romantically in love with Paelis himself.