#rahjkat

everyones needs are different and valid

that’s fair but I still feel really..............greedy and overly needy in comparison to what others are going through, esp my friends with their current medical needs and here I am like

im proud of u too. idek how to make gifs with out gyazo or some shit

im here for you em

white noise like fans can help with the noises thing… but im sorry this happened to you ��

im gonna do katja

Oh.  Oh, darling.  Let me welcome you to the glory that is these books.  I apologize for the infodump that is about to follow here but I cannot help it.  I love these books so fucking much I can’t even tell you.  However - heavy trigger warnings for rape, sexual abuse, and torture, at least in the first couple books; I’ll talk more about this later but in case you don’t make it all the way to that part I want to say it upfront and make sure you hear it before you decide whether or not to read them.

The short version is, it’s a series of books by Anne Bishop - well, I use the term series loosely, since it’s one trilogy, one duology, two short story collections, and two standalone novels, with varying levels of interconnectedness with each other - that has been my absolute favorite fictional world and characters and set of stories for the past decade and then some.  Like, I read it for the first time in my first year of college, and it just soaked into my brain and has shaped the way I look at a lot of things tbh.  It’s dark fantasy based around a matriarchal society with a magic system where the deeper one can descend into the psychic abyss, the more power one has, and the darker one’s Jewels are (magical stones that come from dragon scales and are attuned to the person who wears them).  The books are, in my preferred/recommended reading order:

Daughter of the Blood (original trilogy #1)

Heir to the Shadows (original trilogy #2)

Queen of the Darkness (original trilogy #3)

Dreams Made Flesh (short story collection #1)

Tangled Webs (standalone #1, takes place not too terribly long after the original trilogy)

The Invisible Ring (standalone #2, taking place long before the main trilogy, and less connected to the other books than any of the others - doesn’t really matter when you read this one as long as you do it before you read the duology because they’re based on the far-future outcome of this book)

The Shadow Queen (duology #1, focused on a different set of characters but with reasonably consistent secondary involvement from the original core characters)

Shalador’s Lady (duology #2)

Twilight’s Dawn (short story collection #2 - read this last because it contains the final story of this entire timeline)

The good: the characters are fucking outstanding.  The dialogue is wonderful, the growth arcs are solid, everyone just *feels* real in the best kind of way.  Rereading these books, to me, is like coming home and being surrounded by family.  Many many very powerful female characters who do not take anyone’s shit.  Most of the core characters are Definitively Not White (although this does mean you have the usual whitewashing problem in fanart and manips and stuff).  The magic system is interesting, the society is well-thought-out and intriguing, they’re just a really entertaining and engaging read overall.  I CONSTANTLY reread them.  Literally almost always have one of them open as a current read on my tablet alongside whatever else I’m reading.  They are mental comfort food to me.

The ...eh:  It’s very, very cishet.  Like almost painfully so.  The social system is inherently structured around an extremely strict gender binary with specific powers that are only available to one gender or another (though I do headcanon one of my favorite characters as genderfluid, but that’s just me).  There are two non-het characters, one gay man who nevertheless is never actually seen dating another man and ends up in kind of a nonsexual platonic partnership with a female main character, and one female character who could be read as either lesbian or ace?  It’s not totally clear - we are told she isn’t interested in men sexually, but we never see her with anyone, and I personally read her as ace but I know there are other people who read her as lesbian so that’s kind of up for interpretation - and she, too, ends up in a nonsexual hetero partnership.  So the treatment of queerness is like...eh...you kinda tried I guess?  But everyone still ends up functionally heterosexual in the end anyway, even canonically queer characters, which can be frustrating.  Also, the gender politics are pretty strongly early-90′s gender essentialist feminism I guess I would call it?  There’s much talk of the “gentler, deeper strength” of women and blah blah.  Which is better than women being weak but it grates on me a little bit sometimes now, in a way it didn’t when I was younger.  

The bad:  SO. MUCH. SEXUAL. ABUSE. AND. ASSAULT. AND. TORTURE.  I’m not kidding - massive, massive trigger warnings, especially on the first book of the original trilogy, for a crapton of child abuse and molestation and rape and torture.  On the bright side (I can’t believe I just said that in this context) it’s not done salaciously and the camera doesn’t linger on it, at least not the sexual violence aspects.  There are no drawn-out detailed descriptive rape scenes, and it’s depicted as brutal in an ugly way rather than the borderline-sexy way rape gets depicted in a lot of media.  But literally 90% of the core cast are survivors of sexual violence - including the men.  

Which is interesting, though, too, because it explores what that means and how sexual trauma can have lasting effects - one of the main characters, who is an undeniable badass who is the second most powerful person in their entire universe (second only to his wife), literally can’t return to certain places because of the memories it stirs up.  So you see all these amazing characters, incredibly powerful people, who carry the mental and emotional scars of what they’ve been through but have learned various ways to deal with it and live with it and work around it and it’s just...it’s really good okay.

I think I’ve probably either bored you to death, run you off in terror with my obsessive fansqueeing, or convinced you to give them a try by now, so I’ll shut up.  But feel free to poke me again if you have more questions - let me know if you want those replies to be private, I just wanted to post this one publicly so I could gush about my favorite books to every single one of my followers GO READ THIS BOOK ALL OF YOU RIGHT NOW.