My Favorite Raksura Thing
Apr. 9th, 2016 01:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via http://ift.tt/1VFK9Ut:
I just finished the latest of the Books of the Raksura, which is the current ongoing thing in Martha Wells’s world, and there are about a billion things that are my favorite about the Raksura, but the gender semi-inversion thing they have going on that means that the main protagonist, a young male named Moon, is narratively, functionally, The Beautiful Princess.
Let me back up and explain Raksura a little bit first– these books are set in a world (The Three Worlds) where there are many many many species. Raksura are one of these species, and they are shapeshifting dragon-people that naturally live in large, complicated colonies. (Other species include skylings, which exclusively fly, sealings, which live in the sea, and a vast array of groundlings, which are non-flying creatures– some with horns, some with insectoid features, lots of semi-humanish ones, but actually nobody’s strictly human, which is nice in a setting like this to not have that default. Raksura mostly have a groundling form, and a scaled form; roughly half of them when in that form can fly. They can shift at will between those two forms, but most have no other appreciable magical abilities, and can’t do any other kind of shifting.)
The series revolves around Moon, who was orphaned at a young age after an attack on his colony. He was rescued from the attack by a woman who thought she was the last survivor, and she and the handful of other babies she rescued were killed when he was still too young to have learned what he was. So he reaches adulthood on his own, learning that he has to conceal that he has a winged form at all in order to blend in and live with the many societies of groundlings who all instinctively fear his winged shape– which strongly resembles that of a vicious predator species, the Fell.
So he grows up having no idea that he is a beautiful princess. Because most of the groundling societies he lived in were not structured anything like Raksura society. In the first book, the Cloud Roads, he finds his own people, and it’s a little bit of a culture shock. The first trilogy is a pretty solid and uncompromising look at how hard it is when your dreams come true and you find where you belong, and then you have to live like that, and you don’t know which fork to use or who speaks first or what it means when someone shakes their head from side to side, and these were supposed to be your people and you don’t fit in here either. And then there is a lot of Action Plot, which I’m super fond of. But wound through all of that is that emotional truth, and the love interest is this super terrifying badass Mighty Warrior-type who has no idea how to woo a Beautiful Princess (they’re really called consorts) and fucks it up, and she’s just so powerful and so enormous and he’s fucking terrified of her and also totally attracted to her and has no idea what to do about it. (Jade, is her name.)
And so throughout the books, which are mostly from his point of view, we only really realize that he’s a beautiful princess because of other characters’ reactions to him. And it’s fantastic. It’s such a good inversion of the trope. If you haven’t read the books, I recommend them wholeheartedly, with the sliiiiight caveat that the last one is clearly the first in a series and so ends on a resolution but the plot isn’t totally resolved, so– but if you haven’t read them yet, you have so much to read up to then, go and start now!
I’m wittering on like this in lieu of writing fic, because, get this (beyond my plate being full), I have a super hard time writing reasonable Raksura because I fuck up the gender inversion. (And it’s not even– an inversion, there are so many complicated nuances of who can breed with whom, though refreshingly just about anybody can have sex with anybody else, there’s no real taboos about that– but the main deal is that Moon is supposed to be this sweet shy beautiful baby-making caretaker peacemaker type, and Jade is supposed to be this super badass, so that in particular is pretty neatly inverted from typical fantasy novels.)
So you just get these little glimpses of how pretty he is– and clearly, other characters who don’t know him are expecting him to be shy, and retiring, and concerned with manners, and interested in taking care of babies above all else. And so when he’s scrappy and aggressive and unafraid, people don’t know how to deal. It’s exactly like he’s the beautiful lost princess.
In the latest book, his being pretty mostly comes up in another character having a crush on him and him not really figuring it out, which is kind of a little bit of a lighter thing against the quite serious Action Plot. He has matured, and has grown more comfortable and confident in his role in the colony.
And, I remember the author writing about this on Twitter– at one point he fakes a swoon into Jade’s arms to get out of an awkward social situation, and it is hilarious and perfect.
Anyway. That was a bit rambly, we’ll blame the fact that I still have a skin-aching fever, but I just wanted to share my favorite Raksura thing, which is that Moon is a beautiful princess who thinks of himself as an action hero.
I just finished the latest of the Books of the Raksura, which is the current ongoing thing in Martha Wells’s world, and there are about a billion things that are my favorite about the Raksura, but the gender semi-inversion thing they have going on that means that the main protagonist, a young male named Moon, is narratively, functionally, The Beautiful Princess.
Let me back up and explain Raksura a little bit first– these books are set in a world (The Three Worlds) where there are many many many species. Raksura are one of these species, and they are shapeshifting dragon-people that naturally live in large, complicated colonies. (Other species include skylings, which exclusively fly, sealings, which live in the sea, and a vast array of groundlings, which are non-flying creatures– some with horns, some with insectoid features, lots of semi-humanish ones, but actually nobody’s strictly human, which is nice in a setting like this to not have that default. Raksura mostly have a groundling form, and a scaled form; roughly half of them when in that form can fly. They can shift at will between those two forms, but most have no other appreciable magical abilities, and can’t do any other kind of shifting.)
The series revolves around Moon, who was orphaned at a young age after an attack on his colony. He was rescued from the attack by a woman who thought she was the last survivor, and she and the handful of other babies she rescued were killed when he was still too young to have learned what he was. So he reaches adulthood on his own, learning that he has to conceal that he has a winged form at all in order to blend in and live with the many societies of groundlings who all instinctively fear his winged shape– which strongly resembles that of a vicious predator species, the Fell.
So he grows up having no idea that he is a beautiful princess. Because most of the groundling societies he lived in were not structured anything like Raksura society. In the first book, the Cloud Roads, he finds his own people, and it’s a little bit of a culture shock. The first trilogy is a pretty solid and uncompromising look at how hard it is when your dreams come true and you find where you belong, and then you have to live like that, and you don’t know which fork to use or who speaks first or what it means when someone shakes their head from side to side, and these were supposed to be your people and you don’t fit in here either. And then there is a lot of Action Plot, which I’m super fond of. But wound through all of that is that emotional truth, and the love interest is this super terrifying badass Mighty Warrior-type who has no idea how to woo a Beautiful Princess (they’re really called consorts) and fucks it up, and she’s just so powerful and so enormous and he’s fucking terrified of her and also totally attracted to her and has no idea what to do about it. (Jade, is her name.)
And so throughout the books, which are mostly from his point of view, we only really realize that he’s a beautiful princess because of other characters’ reactions to him. And it’s fantastic. It’s such a good inversion of the trope. If you haven’t read the books, I recommend them wholeheartedly, with the sliiiiight caveat that the last one is clearly the first in a series and so ends on a resolution but the plot isn’t totally resolved, so– but if you haven’t read them yet, you have so much to read up to then, go and start now!
I’m wittering on like this in lieu of writing fic, because, get this (beyond my plate being full), I have a super hard time writing reasonable Raksura because I fuck up the gender inversion. (And it’s not even– an inversion, there are so many complicated nuances of who can breed with whom, though refreshingly just about anybody can have sex with anybody else, there’s no real taboos about that– but the main deal is that Moon is supposed to be this sweet shy beautiful baby-making caretaker peacemaker type, and Jade is supposed to be this super badass, so that in particular is pretty neatly inverted from typical fantasy novels.)
So you just get these little glimpses of how pretty he is– and clearly, other characters who don’t know him are expecting him to be shy, and retiring, and concerned with manners, and interested in taking care of babies above all else. And so when he’s scrappy and aggressive and unafraid, people don’t know how to deal. It’s exactly like he’s the beautiful lost princess.
In the latest book, his being pretty mostly comes up in another character having a crush on him and him not really figuring it out, which is kind of a little bit of a lighter thing against the quite serious Action Plot. He has matured, and has grown more comfortable and confident in his role in the colony.
And, I remember the author writing about this on Twitter– at one point he fakes a swoon into Jade’s arms to get out of an awkward social situation, and it is hilarious and perfect.
Anyway. That was a bit rambly, we’ll blame the fact that I still have a skin-aching fever, but I just wanted to share my favorite Raksura thing, which is that Moon is a beautiful princess who thinks of himself as an action hero.
