mellicious | Entries tagged with fandoms

(I decided the trees icon was about as fairy-like as anything I had either here or on the old Livejournal - I had a lot more icons there, back in the day, and they're still there so I go crib from there occasionally - so that's what I'm using for these entries, assuming I remember!)

Part 1 is here, and this starts with chapter 6 of Rosemary and Rue.
Again: SPOILERS!

Chapter 6 picks up with Toby reviewing her options after leaving the Queen's knowe. Obviously the Queen has no intention of getting involved. Other courts are equally dangerous. It's not a mortal problem - the police already have the murder case but they have no clue what's actually going on. She doesn't want to go to Sylvester, her duke, or at least not yet, although she knows she'll have to eventually. There are other fae: the Luidaeg; Lily from the Tea Gardens - but she eliminates those too. The only other thing she can come up with is a place and a person from her past: the place is called "Home" and the person is an underworld figure named Devin, the sort of guy who takes in teen changelings and uses them for "favors." (It says a lot about Toby's state of mind to me that she thinks this is her best option.) She was one of Devin's kids, once, but since her mother is a sort of fae celebrity, she got treated somewhat better than most. She was "his lover and his pet and his favorite toy," she says. Sylvester eventually got her out of that life, and she's barely seen Devin since.

Chapter 7 - "Home" itself is a sort of dive where Devin and a bunch of teenage changelings live like Lost Boys (and Girls). Toby immediately gets into a squabble with a couple of kids in the front room: siblings, Manuel & Dare; they are Tylwyth Teg/Piskie quarter-bloods. Apparently in the years while Toby was a fish, the Queen tried to shut Home down, but Evening stopped her. This surprises Toby; she would've thought Evening would consider the place beneath her. Toby also reminisces about how she thought she was in love with Devin at one point, and he persuaded her to promise him that she wouldn't marry her (now ex-)fiance until their daughter Gillian was old enough to make her Choice or she turned 13 (which strikes me as creepily specific). Now Devin wants her to back off the investigation - but she doesn't tell him about the binding, so he doesn't know she has no choice about it. He agrees to help, but not for free, naturally. The form of payment is left unspecified.

Chapter 8 - When Toby gets back to her car, she hears a noise and finds that it's a rose-goblin, a sort of cat-shaped fae creature that's actually an animate rosebush, thorns and all. It's carrying a key on a string - one that she's seen before, when she tasted Evening's blood. (Oh yeah, I wasn't being super-specific in the last entry and I didn't mention that part. Let's just say that Toby can get information by tasting blood - icky but useful, I guess!) While puzzling over the key, T. talks about how the number 3 is sacred in Faerie: 3 courts, 3 rulers, all that. There's a saying that there are three roads to every destination: the easy way, the hard way, and the long way - and Evening had a business called Third Road Enterprises, probably referencing that saying. Toby decides she needs to go take a look at Evening's offices.

Chapter 9 - What Toby finds in Evening's office suite (hidden in a file cabinet) is a very rare magical object: a "hope chest." There were once said to be 12 of them, made by Oberon himself, and they can supposedly change the balance of a person's blood, and make them completely human or completely fae. (You can see why that would be tempting for a half-fae like Toby.) She isn't really sure she believes this, but she also thinks "you can trust the ones you hate" - meaning Evening, I guess! (She and E. were more frenemies than real friends.) Something whispers in the back of her head, maybe from Evening's memories: The key will open the way in Goldengreen (which is Evening's own knowe). So that's probably another place she needs to go.

So, in chapter 10, she takes the hope chest to Tybalt, because he's a pureblood and won't be tempted by it, and as a Cait Sidhe, he's not a subject of the Queen. He's not happy about taking it, but he promises to keep it safe, in a binding way - and this is not something I'd ever particularly paid attention to before, but I went back and wrote down the words of the binding:
Tybalt says:

By root and branch, by leaf and vine, on rowan and oak and ash and thorn, I swear that what is given to my keeping shall remain in my keeping, and shall be given over only to the one who holds my bond. My blood to the defense of the task I am set, my heart to the keeping of the promise to which I am bound.

and Toby responds:

Broken promises are the road to our damnation. Promises kept are the meeting of all our myriad roads. And such a meeting will my promise be.

(Or maybe both of them say that last bit. It's unclear.)

(I can't say anything about why I think that's important without getting all spoilery, but people who've read further into the series will surely understand!)

Part 3 is here. (I guess I'm going to have to do an index eventually, but if I do I'll go back and add links!)

(See here for a bit of background on this!)

Rosemary and Rue
by Seanan McGuire
published 2009 (note that there's a 2019 anniversary edition with some new material, which is what I've been using lately)

This is a plot summary plus commentary, basically. It started out as just notes for myself so it's not necessarily consistent in level of detail, etc.

Generally, these books are about a secret world of fairies (or fae) who live among us. (This pretty much explains itself as it goes.) They are set in and around San Francisco. There are currently 18 books so there's a lot of stuff to talk about if I'll stick with it!

This book starts on 6/9/1995 (for the prologue), and then skips to 2/23/2009 (which would have been more or less "present day" at the time it was published).

If you haven't read these books then be aware that there are definitely SPOILERS!!!!!
SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS
(just want to make that clear! - although I'll try to go easy on spoilers for later books in the series)

(Note that I'm putting new names - and species, etc - in boldface the first time I use them.)

Prologue: In 1995, Toby (short for October) is working as a private investigator, and is trailing a fae named Simon, whose magic smells of smoke and rotten oranges - you don't need to memorize everyone's smell, just know that what fae & part-fae people smell like is important, in this tale. (Think of it as sort of a signature thing - everyone smells a little different, and people who are related by blood generally have similar scents.) She trails Simon to Golden Gate Park, where he meets a woman named Oleander - who's 900 years old, Toby says, but still looks like a teenager. There, Simon turns Toby into a fish (a koi, specifically), and kicks her into a fish-pond. And she stays there, in fish form, for fourteen years. She snaps out of it, suddenly, in June 2009.

Chapter 1 picks up six months later. Toby is working as a checker at a Safeway near downtown SF. The first customer we see her checking out is someone we later learn is called the Luidaeg, but Toby doesn't know her yet, at this point. (She is buying gourmet ice cream and Diet Coke.) In between customers, there's some backstory: Toby's parents were a fairy woman and an Irish accountant, so T. is half-fae, a changeling in this book's terminology. The second customer we see is a childhood friend named Mitch, and this is not a coincidence: her old friends keep trying to draw her back into their circle, but she's pushing them away.

On her way home from work she sees a kelpie, a fairy horse; she also talks about how everybody tells her her name is weird - and I'm guessing that would happen a lot when you're a supermarket checker named "October" - even in San Francisco. - It's almost dawn, and dawn strips away fae illusions. (Very uncomfortable for somebody like Toby whose magic is weak.) She meets Tybalt, King of Cats (currently in human form), who seems to make a specialty of tormenting her. He calls her "little fish," mockingly. (When he changes to cat-form, he seems to fold inward, and there's a popping noise and the smell of his magic - and then he's a tabby cat.)

Chapter 2
When she gets home to her apartment, there's a teenage boy slouching in the doorway - I believe we'll learn later that he's called Quentin, although he's not named here. (Pale-blond hair, Canadian accent, so yes.) He calls her "Lady Daye" but she says it was "Sir Daye" when it was anything. Quentin works for Sylvester, who a duke and is Toby's "liege," in the medievalist terms the fae use, but the message he gives her is not phrased as a direct order, so she ignores it and goes to bed.

She dreams about her mother, Amandine, playing "fairy bride" with Toby's human father. Toby was born in 1952, making her 57 here. (She is not immortal, but even changelings live much longer than a regular human. The books never really discuss how old Toby appears to be, but clearly it's much younger than she actually is.)

Fae children are protected by "baby magic" which keeps small children from giving themselves away - but at some point it fails, and then a changeling is given a choice of whether to be fae or human - this is called the Changeling's Choice. It was Sylvester who came to give "the Choice" to Toby, who was 7 at the time. She said, "I'm like Mommy," and they pulled both her and her mother through to the Summerlands (part of Faerie) and burned down the house so that her father would think they both died. Toby's mother didn't want to go back to the Summerlands, and she blamed Toby. She was happy playing fairy bride. (Note that if the child chooses to be human, they are killed, to prevent them from revealing the existence of Faerie. So not really much of a choice.)

Toby dreams about being a fish. She says sunlight hurt, even as a fish, and maybe that helped her remember that something was wrong, that she wasn't really supposed to be a fish. The spell gave way at dawn one morning, just over 14 years after it was cast. (7 is a magic number, and 14 is 7x2, after all, maybe that's significant? I don't know.) The pond she had been imprisoned in was just outside the Tea Gardens, which in this world is a knowe (a "hollow hill") maintained by a water-fae named Lily, who knows Toby. She stumbled naked in that direction, not really understanding what was happening, and Lily must've been there, Toby assumes, because someone cast a spell on her so that she looked human by the time the police got there.

It took her a while to understand how much time had gone by. The police think she was kidnapped. Toby obviously can't tell them about how she was a fish, so she falls back on "I don't remember" instead. And she's devastated. She had a fiance and a small daughter, who's now a teenager. They think she abandoned them, and naturally she can't tell them the truth either.

It was another fae noble, a woman named Evening, who picked up the pieces of Toby, found her a place to stay, tried to help her get her PI license back, etc. It's important to know this because...

Chapter 3
Later on, when Toby wakes up, there's a series of phone messages from Evening - they start with "Pick up, dammit," and go downhill from there. The last message is a spell, a binding. Toby must investigate Evening's death (even though Evening's clearly alive and talking as the spell is cast) or Toby will die, too.

Chapter 4
Toby goes to Evening's condo - a very expensive place. The police are there. Since Evening is a pureblood fae, the body the police have found won't actually be hers. Fae bodies don't decay, so to hide this, there are creatures called night-haunts, whose job is to come to the scene of fae deaths - they eat the actual body and put a simulacrum in its place, which looks exactly like the deceased, but behaves as a human body would. This is one of the workarounds that fae culture has developed to avoid being found out.

Chapter 5
Toby finds evidence that Evening was killed by iron bullets and a knife. She realizes that she needs to go to the local queen with the news; Evening was a countess, and the fae have customs for this. The Queen of the Mists rules Northern California, as she has since 1906, when her father died in the great earthquake. (There was apparently some doubt about this at the time, but Evening helped the new queen get established.) The queen has no name (which is why you will see me refer to her as NQ, for Nameless Queen). She hates changelings, and Toby more than most, because Toby was too successful, and because Sylvester forced the Queen to knight her - thus she is officially "Sir Daye."

The royal knowe is on the beach in San Francisco. The Queen knows she's coming - although not why - and she changes Toby's jeans into a ballgown before she ever gets inside. Toby says her ritual piece ("Evening has stopped her dancing") and the Queen is shocked and then angry.

(I was thinking about why NQ would be so angry - I don't think she and Evening were buddies - and it occurred to me that maybe she was somehow dependent on Evening for something other than just getting her on the throne in the first place. I don't know what that would mean exactly, but it does make sense.)

Anyway, she refuses Toby any help, and Toby runs away - because the Queen is dangerous when she's angry. She is part Banshee and she can actually kill with her voice.

Part 2 is here.

During Holidailies in December, I talked a couple of times about the October Daye books by Seanan McGuire. I have gotten to be more-than-just-mildly obsessed with these books. I talked about it with at least one other person who is a fan here, and I poked around the edges of the October Daye fandom - there's a wiki, for one thing. But I had already started making fairly extensive notes that were a combination of plot summaries and commentary before I even looked at that. These are books about fairies, pretty heavily based in folklore, but mostly my notes are more about the lore within the books. I am just starting to dip a toe into the actual folk-history related to this.

I've decided that since I have all this stuff, I really should put some of it up online. I should also make it very clear that I'm no expert about folklore in general - I was an English major once upon a time, and I'm sure they had folklore-related classes which I could have taken, but I didn't dip into that area. (My degree is in Liberal Arts, which I'm aware is completely out of fashion these days. I took the most classes in English Lit and also in Government but lots of other things as well.) Anyway, if I don't lose momentum I'm going to start typing this stuff up and putting it up here. It's mostly my own take on all this although as I said, I have looked a little at what other fan-made sites are around. (On the whole what I read didn't make me feel like I was wildly off-track with other people's takes.)

So this is just a little intro for if you see this stuff popping up and wonder what I'm up to. There will definitely be spoilers.

This is a list I made while I was reading Sleep No More. I kept noticing little things that didn't match up - and we knew the second book was coming, so I started making a list. I thought I had thrown this away but I found it again and I thought it was sort of interesting, now that I've read both books.

The "gap" list (questions after reading October #17) - But some spoilers here for 18, so beware!

The broken window - I assumed this would turn out to be Tybalt or somebody and of course it was
Why are there purebloods (Dame Altair etc.) out robbing people? To me that part is really odd.
A couple of different characters said somebody had made potions for them, and I kept assuming that must be Walther, but no, apparently it was Simon. So, what, Walther is back in Silences being a princess? - it's mentioned in passing that he's making potions for Silences. Unclear about whether they're cool with his current gender.
I loved the bit about how Titania mourned for the Merrow. (Not hardly.)
I guessed that the Queen of the Mists here was the same one it used to be, the crazy one - I usually call her NQ in my notes, for Nameless Queen. But the story they tell about her background is a little different in the alt-universe - she's now "born of a distaff line" rather than just being passed off as Gilad's daughter. I guess somebody learned from past mistakes!
How did August and Simon get to Golden Shores? - with Tybalt & Gin, apparently
It's supposed to be a "family secret" that Amy & co. can take all the fae out of a person (right? that's the part that's controversial?) so why does Etienne know? DrunkSylvester told him? - yep!
it's just really hard sometimes to sort out what out of all this is just false memories and what is true!
re Luna: one of her parents is Maeve's child (dad) and one is Titania's (mom) so I guess maybe that's why Luna is such a raging bitch without the kitsune skin to calm her down
We see Eira asleep, but "Eira" is also at Goldengreen, so that one must be Cass or Karen, I would think. Come to think of it, maybe that's why Simon now thinks Eira is "wonderful."
October sees Blind Michael as being flickery, which is what Garm says illusions look like - I wonder if Toby is developing a talent for that, now!

I made a list of what I've been reading lately, and I was going to talk about several different series that I've been reading. But I'm in the middle of the latest Shadowhunters book, and I seem to have Feelings about it. So I don't figure I'll get much further than this tonight.

I used to say "I'm reading a Cassie Clare book" or "I'm reading a Mortal Instruments book" but Shadowhunters is the name of the TV series (on Disney, switching to Netflix, I hear) so I figure they're all Shadowhunters books now. I'm sure not everybody has read these books and not everybody even knows about that series, either. (it's on Disney, after all - if you don't have kids you don't necessarily follow what's on Disney channels, at least I don't.)

"The Mortal Instruments" was the name of the first six books - or was it only the first three? I forget. I can't keep all the series names straight, anyway, which is why I'm perfectly happy to switch to a nice simple(-ish) name like Shadowhunters. I can remember The Mortal Instruments for some reason but I can't ever remember the name of the series that was set in the 1800s or the one I'm reading now. It's "The Dark Artifices" but I only know that because I looked earlier today, and who knows if I'll remember by tomorrow. Maybe I will, because I was thinking about why it's called that. This is the set of books that's set (generally) in California - although really only the first book stayed put in California, and since then they have bopped around and large parts of it have taken place in Europe and some in Faerie, too. I decided that Dark Artifices makes sense because it has running plot-lines about necromancy and there's a physical Book of the Dead that everybody keeps looking for. (And also a xeroxed copy of it, which I was amused to find that the Fairy Queen doesn't know what to make of.)

(I just took a detour of an hour or so over to my old Livejournal because I was pretty sure I remembered talking about Shadowhunters, and I found it. It was at the time - almost three years ago - when the Shadowhunters series was starting up, and I went on at some length about the casting with reference to the book and also the very bad feature film (City of Bones) from a few years back. That's here, and also a little bit in the entry before that, here.)

Well, so anyway, the third book of the fourth trilogy about Shadowhunters has just come out (Queen of Air and Darkness). So there's an actual dozen books - not even counting the short story collections about Magnus and Simon and the one reference book. I'm about a third of the way through, I think, so nobody tell me any spoilers. (I was thinking that the one thing I really miss about reading physical books is that you can look at where you are and make a good ballpark estimate of how much is left and how long it might take you to finish. "34%" tells you that you're a third of the way through but not how long the damn thing is.) I re-read the two previous books plus the last Jace-and-Clary book (City of Heavenly Fire) because that's where these characters were introduced. I realized that I found the previous book (Lord of Shadows) a long slog, in particular. It's very talky. I enjoy the plot, when it finally happens, and it's not that I hate the rest of it, but I think it could have stood some editing down. I'm kind of impatient generally with the whole Emma-and-Julian doomed lovers business. Maybe it's partly because Cassie Clare has kind of worn that trope out, really. We were in the car the other day and for some reason I started trying to explain the whole thing to Rob about how Jace has had about three or four different last names and he was Clary's brother - no, he's not! - and all of that stuff. (I never believed that he would turn out to be Clary's brother for a minute.) Anyway, I like the characters of Emma and Julian aside from the whole romance thing but man, is that one plot that I'm bored with. (The romance that I'm really feeling is the whole Mark-and-Christina-and-hot-fairy-prince threesome thing.)

Current Mood: frustrated

Okay, I said I was sort of "meh" about Shadowhunters the TV series, but I actually watched it again and I was still (mostly) interested, so I guess I liked it more than I thought, really. So I have Thoughts, which are not going to be really deep or anything, most likely. I was thinking about the cast of the movie vs the cast of the TV series (vs maybe also the books), so let's see...

and oh, right, SPOILERS (if you haven't seen Shadowhunters pilot, or y'know, read the books - I guess I'll put the rest it behind a cut, just to be polite)

( Read more... )

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Rosemary and Rue (October Daye book 1, part 2)
Rosemary and Rue - October Daye book 1, part 1
October Daye again
Questions about October #17
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Shadowhunters cast

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Entries tagged with fandoms

Rosemary and Rue (October Daye book 1, part 2)

Rosemary and Rue - October Daye book 1, part 1

October Daye again

Questions about October #17

Shadowhunters

Shadowhunters cast