Damn you, Avengers! You were so good, you totally made me forget to post this.;)
Part Thirteen, And Last:
Y is for—Yu Ming-ch'in
Aka, the hex formerly known as
Songbird, who I frankly made up as a bit of a human plot twist, the
way you do—she appears early on in A Book of Tongues to
basically perform three functions: Confirm the parasitical nature of
most hex-on-hex interaction, deliver exposition along with a
particular item and be creepy, with a side-order of demonstrating
just how effed up someone else raised in the same whorish San
Francisco subculture as Chess Pargeter was could be. I made her
Chinese because of the San Francisco connection, made her an albino
because I was thinking of Bridget Lin Chin-hsia in The Bride With
White Hair, and made her twelve-or-thirteen because I liked the
idea of this tiny little girl who happens to have been raised in a
tradition that makes her far more knowledgable about hexation than
the Rev is topping a guy the size of Clancy Brown. And since I
thought I wasn't going ever to see her again, I convinced myself that
that meant the fact that she conforms to a bunch of Wily Oriental
stereotypes wasn't quite as gross as it might be...but even then, I
think I also knew I was fooling myself.
One way or the other, by the end of A
Book I'd realized that Songbird was far too useful and snarky a
character to dispose of that quickly, and by the beginning of A
Rope of Thorns, she'd even grown an actual name (though again, if
I had a dollar for every time I had to cross-check whether her family
patronymic was Yu or Wu, I'd have at least enough for dinner and a
movie). We discovered that she both reveres and resents her
upbringing, that she thinks of herself as a thousand years of
breeding made flesh, a general who is also a slave—that while she
doesn't exactly like having been sent to America to manage a
whorehouse (and potentially whore herself out as well, on top of it),
she just doesn't see any other paths to take. So her partnership with
Pinkerton, while mainly entered into to avoid the prospect of being
fished in and devoured by Ixchel, is a sort of liberation for her;
like Chess, she's young—very young, and triply disadvantaged
in her gender, her race and her albinism. And for all her power, she
does like being taken care of.
In A Tree of Bones, meanwhile,
we rejoin with Songbird at her lowest possible ebb, the point at
which most characters start to change in interesting ways; she's been
forcibly de-powered by a well-meaning Doc Asbury, captured by a
coalition of long-nosed barbarians and American savages, and wakes up
every day stranded in the middle of a desert, a bad place to be if
you're equally melanin- and friends-poor. In order to survive and
prosper, she has to discard some of her assumptions, her hereditary
Chauvinism very much included, and form new alliances...indeed, much
like Chess in A Rope, what her journey's all about is
basically having to grow up, which in her case is about becoming a
fully-realized human being, as well as a hex. It was a joy to write,
really.
Z is for—Zoroastrianism.
This is something I strive to avoid in
narrative generally, because a system in which absolute Good always
struggles with absolute Evil frankly bores me silly. It's
particularly pernicious when you're writing horror as opposed to
fantasy, because a certain moral weight tends to creep in—ie, one
set of values is identified with Good/Right and thus another set of
values is identified with Evil/Wrong. Given my propensity to write
about people who are antiheroes at best, I much prefer the Mexica
idea that certain values are simply inherent in the system, and
cannot be “gotten rid of” in any permanent way. Or, indeed, the
Diné
concept of Balance being the most important thing to maintain,
especially as the tides of natural and supernatural energy eddy back
and forth.
All
of which is, I suppose, just to say this: If you're expecting A Tree
of Bones to end with a bang, you're half-right. If you're expecting
it to end for good, however...not so much. Nothing ever ends.
It's
been a fun ride, though, and it's definitely over. For now.
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