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cimoreneLast summer some time I read Max Gladstone's Three Parts Dead, the first book in the
The Craft Sequence's universe has similarities to both high fantasy and modern fantasy, because while it's certainly not set in a realistic contemporary world augmented by magic, its magical world has recognizable similarities to earth history and levels of technology that place it near the present day. (Or rather, the 80s perhaps, because before the Internet. So far.) It does this in a way rather analogous to Steampunk and other -punks, except that rather than steam, magic is the force behind the technology. (There's probably a word for this mixture, because I feel like I've seen it before? But I haven't read it before.) The really standout part of the premise is the way in which Gladstone's system of magic is built from a combination of necromancy, real and present gods and their divine powers, and the aforementioned tech. It's incredibly complex and it's fascinating to read about.
(I'd heard of it vaguely before but without running into a more specific recommendation or review.) I enjoyed the world-building, plus I LOVED the female protagonist & multiple central female characters. I couldn't put it down and started the sequel immediately after, filled with bonhomie and confident in Gladstone's female characters and views on gender - or at least confident that this aspect of his worldview wasn't going to skeeve me out the way male writers all too often do.
The second book, Two Serpents Rise, takes place in a different part of the same world, with a new cast of characters. Unlike 3PD, it has a single male protagonist - a disappointment, but the cast of characters is still well balanced. But the next day, I hit the 60% point or something like that in the book, and something I couldn't quite put my finger on in a pivotal chapter put me off so decidedly that I put the book down and didn't finish it for nearly half a year.
Now that I have, I think in retrospect that what happened was this (in abstractish, unspoilery terms): when the mysterious, cool woman who becomes the protagonist's love interest was introduced, she tripped some Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or rather, Manic Badass Dream Girl) alarms for me. She isn't written to a formula, though, and it was clear that there was more going on than mystery for the sake of titillation, so I was willing to trust the author to not use such a sexist trope and kept reading with misgivings. But the levels of mystery, or should I say, ~~mystery around her and the protagonist's relation to her continued to taste bad, and at the aforementioned turning point, she reveals a portion of her ~secrets to the protagonist in a rather Hitchcockianly tense scene. It's the way the novel presents her and this pivotal plot point that I didn't like. In essence, it became clear to me which way the book was going with her, and while I couldn't foresee how the story was going to end, I knew I wasn't going to be happy with that part of it.
The protagonist, Caleb, is an anti-theist in a world where gods are real things he personally knows, to his chagrin. Their high-tech society draws its powers from gods - enchained gods who are exploited by the human sorcerers who defeated them in the God Wars. So anti-theism here is philosophical opposition to worship of the gods - he reasonably sees them as destructive/dangerous forces, since the gods of his (Quechal) people took their worship and power from massive quantities of human sacrifice. At the above-mentioned turning point, he discovers that his lover, Mal1 - herself a powerful sorceress - is a theist who practices worship (by offering drops of her own blood). As I said, the scene is framed in a manner I can most efficiently compare to Hitchcock: ominous and suspenseful, and when Caleb reacts with panic/repulsion/whatever, it's visible to the reader as an overreaction, since we know his bias, but at the same time, it isn't framed as only overreaction. The context of that scene and the rest of the chapter revealed enough that I could see Mal's theism and whatever else associated with it, was going to be an actually threatening force in the plot.
At this point she metamorphoses, in a way, from a manic badass dreamgirl into a femme fatale. After I finished the novel and my expectations were borne out - she turns out to have been The One Behind the Conspiracy All Along, and to suffer from religious and theist fanaticism and a willingness to sacrifice however many people for the greater good - I googled "dark manic pixie dream girl" and "manic pixie dream girl femme fatale".
Nobody has actually used the term "dark manic pixie dream girl", but the dark side of the MPDG is simply the femme fatale, as others have said, although I hadn't thought about that before. The main differences between the two are genre and the hero's attitude afterwards (she's only a femme fatale if she's villified).
I don't accuse Gladstone of actually committing the offence of writing a MPDG - of reducing the character to a two-dimensional being who only exists to enchant and/or teach the protagonist about life per MPDG formula. The plot only aligns with that formula early in the book, while her motives are mysterious to Caleb, but since she is a fully-formed character with her own life, the illusion breaks at the aforementioned pivot-point when more (not all) of her true self is revealed. As Nian Hu says in The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, "the moment we learn more about her and see the world from her point of view, that illusion is destroyed, and she is no longer a manic pixie dream girl but a normal human being. And in this way, the manic pixie dream girl can only exist in the male gaze."
But Mal doesn't stand revealed as an ordinary human because, like the femme fatale often does, she stands revealed instead as the secret adversary - in this case, a poignantly tragic secret adversary whose passion and emotional attachment to Caleb were genuine even as she worked against him. As a fanatic, and one converted at a young age, her motivations and questions of fault and agency are of course complex, but she nonetheless consciously, if inevitably, chooses what she sees as the salvation of her people over him (like Okoye in Black Panther, at least from her point of view). But this layering of motivation, love, and circumstance is a classic femme fatale narrative.
Mal isn't a sexist caricature, a stereotype, or a mere plot device, like the classic MPDG, and she isn't being used as femmes fatales often are as a stand-in for all womankind or to teach a misogynist or nihilist lesson about the insidious dangers of love and passion. Mal is a three-dimensional character who acts for herself of her own motivations, and her flaws and downfall are only her own, because the story contains other examples of fanatics and other examples of passion and love. None of them are presented as binary cases of good vs bad or wise vs foolish.
So what turned me off so profoundly about the plot was simply the shape of it: the tragic love story between the conscientious servant of justice/the greater good and their fully self-aware secret adversary, acting in earnest good faith but philosophical opposition, who inevitably betrays them (with love!).
It's... I mean, it's an opera, and what it says about love and philosophical agreement isn't particularly great from my point of view. Some people definitely like it, for its operatic nature if nothing else. But I'm just fairly sick of it, with a low tolerance for classic tragedy at the best of times, and in this particular book she was the only really top-billed female character (the next down, Caleb's friend Teo, is a supporting), and suddenly seeing her in that role just turned me off so thoroughly that I was no longer enjoying finding out what was going to happen.
I finished because I needed to know what happens in order to read the third book, which I still intend to do, after a break.
1. The setting is influenced by Mexico City and LA, so although the languages in play are high and low Quechal and a colonizer-derived common tongue - that is, the Spanish (or their analogues) may not have conquered the area - the associations are inevitable, and it's worth noting that "Mal" means "bad" in Spanish. back
The Craft Sequence's universe has similarities to both high fantasy and modern fantasy, because while it's certainly not set in a realistic contemporary world augmented by magic, its magical world has recognizable similarities to earth history and levels of technology that place it near the present day. (Or rather, the 80s perhaps, because before the Internet. So far.) It does this in a way rather analogous to Steampunk and other -punks, except that rather than steam, magic is the force behind the technology. (There's probably a word for this mixture, because I feel like I've seen it before? But I haven't read it before.) The really standout part of the premise is the way in which Gladstone's system of magic is built from a combination of necromancy, real and present gods and their divine powers, and the aforementioned tech. It's incredibly complex and it's fascinating to read about.
(I'd heard of it vaguely before but without running into a more specific recommendation or review.) I enjoyed the world-building, plus I LOVED the female protagonist & multiple central female characters. I couldn't put it down and started the sequel immediately after, filled with bonhomie and confident in Gladstone's female characters and views on gender - or at least confident that this aspect of his worldview wasn't going to skeeve me out the way male writers all too often do.
The second book, Two Serpents Rise, takes place in a different part of the same world, with a new cast of characters. Unlike 3PD, it has a single male protagonist - a disappointment, but the cast of characters is still well balanced. But the next day, I hit the 60% point or something like that in the book, and something I couldn't quite put my finger on in a pivotal chapter put me off so decidedly that I put the book down and didn't finish it for nearly half a year.
Now that I have, I think in retrospect that what happened was this (in abstractish, unspoilery terms): when the mysterious, cool woman who becomes the protagonist's love interest was introduced, she tripped some Manic Pixie Dream Girl (or rather, Manic Badass Dream Girl) alarms for me. She isn't written to a formula, though, and it was clear that there was more going on than mystery for the sake of titillation, so I was willing to trust the author to not use such a sexist trope and kept reading with misgivings. But the levels of mystery, or should I say, ~~mystery around her and the protagonist's relation to her continued to taste bad, and at the aforementioned turning point, she reveals a portion of her ~secrets to the protagonist in a rather Hitchcockianly tense scene. It's the way the novel presents her and this pivotal plot point that I didn't like. In essence, it became clear to me which way the book was going with her, and while I couldn't foresee how the story was going to end, I knew I wasn't going to be happy with that part of it.
The protagonist, Caleb, is an anti-theist in a world where gods are real things he personally knows, to his chagrin. Their high-tech society draws its powers from gods - enchained gods who are exploited by the human sorcerers who defeated them in the God Wars. So anti-theism here is philosophical opposition to worship of the gods - he reasonably sees them as destructive/dangerous forces, since the gods of his (Quechal) people took their worship and power from massive quantities of human sacrifice. At the above-mentioned turning point, he discovers that his lover, Mal1 - herself a powerful sorceress - is a theist who practices worship (by offering drops of her own blood). As I said, the scene is framed in a manner I can most efficiently compare to Hitchcock: ominous and suspenseful, and when Caleb reacts with panic/repulsion/whatever, it's visible to the reader as an overreaction, since we know his bias, but at the same time, it isn't framed as only overreaction. The context of that scene and the rest of the chapter revealed enough that I could see Mal's theism and whatever else associated with it, was going to be an actually threatening force in the plot.
At this point she metamorphoses, in a way, from a manic badass dreamgirl into a femme fatale. After I finished the novel and my expectations were borne out - she turns out to have been The One Behind the Conspiracy All Along, and to suffer from religious and theist fanaticism and a willingness to sacrifice however many people for the greater good - I googled "dark manic pixie dream girl" and "manic pixie dream girl femme fatale".
Nobody has actually used the term "dark manic pixie dream girl", but the dark side of the MPDG is simply the femme fatale, as others have said, although I hadn't thought about that before. The main differences between the two are genre and the hero's attitude afterwards (she's only a femme fatale if she's villified).
I don't accuse Gladstone of actually committing the offence of writing a MPDG - of reducing the character to a two-dimensional being who only exists to enchant and/or teach the protagonist about life per MPDG formula. The plot only aligns with that formula early in the book, while her motives are mysterious to Caleb, but since she is a fully-formed character with her own life, the illusion breaks at the aforementioned pivot-point when more (not all) of her true self is revealed. As Nian Hu says in The Manic Pixie Dream Girl, "the moment we learn more about her and see the world from her point of view, that illusion is destroyed, and she is no longer a manic pixie dream girl but a normal human being. And in this way, the manic pixie dream girl can only exist in the male gaze."
But Mal doesn't stand revealed as an ordinary human because, like the femme fatale often does, she stands revealed instead as the secret adversary - in this case, a poignantly tragic secret adversary whose passion and emotional attachment to Caleb were genuine even as she worked against him. As a fanatic, and one converted at a young age, her motivations and questions of fault and agency are of course complex, but she nonetheless consciously, if inevitably, chooses what she sees as the salvation of her people over him (like Okoye in Black Panther, at least from her point of view). But this layering of motivation, love, and circumstance is a classic femme fatale narrative.
Mal isn't a sexist caricature, a stereotype, or a mere plot device, like the classic MPDG, and she isn't being used as femmes fatales often are as a stand-in for all womankind or to teach a misogynist or nihilist lesson about the insidious dangers of love and passion. Mal is a three-dimensional character who acts for herself of her own motivations, and her flaws and downfall are only her own, because the story contains other examples of fanatics and other examples of passion and love. None of them are presented as binary cases of good vs bad or wise vs foolish.
So what turned me off so profoundly about the plot was simply the shape of it: the tragic love story between the conscientious servant of justice/the greater good and their fully self-aware secret adversary, acting in earnest good faith but philosophical opposition, who inevitably betrays them (with love!).
It's... I mean, it's an opera, and what it says about love and philosophical agreement isn't particularly great from my point of view. Some people definitely like it, for its operatic nature if nothing else. But I'm just fairly sick of it, with a low tolerance for classic tragedy at the best of times, and in this particular book she was the only really top-billed female character (the next down, Caleb's friend Teo, is a supporting), and suddenly seeing her in that role just turned me off so thoroughly that I was no longer enjoying finding out what was going to happen.
I finished because I needed to know what happens in order to read the third book, which I still intend to do, after a break.
1. The setting is influenced by Mexico City and LA, so although the languages in play are high and low Quechal and a colonizer-derived common tongue - that is, the Spanish (or their analogues) may not have conquered the area - the associations are inevitable, and it's worth noting that "Mal" means "bad" in Spanish. back
(no subject)
Date: 18 Jan 2019 02:50 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 18 Jan 2019 06:53 pm (UTC)ETA: But while I'm not a completist like... philosophically or in general, I probably wouldn't have wanted to skip it after how much I enjoyed the first book. I would have worried that there could have been some really cool idea in it that I would have loved if I'd seen it. (There wasn't, not really, but there were plenty of really cool touches in the setting...)
(no subject)
Date: 19 Jan 2019 10:09 am (UTC)Good to hear from hebethen's comment that it's okay to just skip this book, I think I will do that
(no subject)
Date: 19 Jan 2019 09:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 22 Jan 2019 06:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 22 Jan 2019 07:54 pm (UTC)... it really has the whole plot structure and a similar kind of relationship to their sick society (with the difference that instead of walking into the sunset with a nihilistic one-liner, the hero dedicates himself to trying to fix society for a better future at the end). And I'm just not that into world-weary man pain from young men who work for The Man, not even if they're smart, feminist young men of color.
(no subject)
Date: 21 Jan 2019 03:20 pm (UTC)FWIW, book three (Full Fathom Five) takes place in a different point in time. (Publication order != chronological order (although I think Gladstone still recommends you read by publication order. Chronologically, it goes by the number in the title: Last First Snow is set earliest, then Two Serpents Rise, and so on.)
(no subject)
Date: 22 Jan 2019 07:55 pm (UTC)