what I really want

[laurajv]

is some great fic about Csethiro Ceredin
- and her relationship with Maia
- and with her father
- and her friendship with Vedero Drazhin
- and for that matter Vedero’s developing relationship with Maia
- everyone’s relationships with Maia in fact

but mostly Csethiro and Vedero, who are super interesting and awesome!

(I might have written 2000+ words of this today; someone please talk to me about the Drazhada and Ceredada before I go completely off the deep end!)

Comments

[mecurtin]

I just finished re-reading yesterday, so I am all ears!

[laurajv]

SO CSETHIRO

- who gave her bad intel about Maia? (I was thinking Osmin Duchenin but it could've been Csuro but why would she even ask Csuro SHE WOULDN'T, right?)

- she doesn't seem to have a great relationship with her father, but she DOES seem to be permitted to study whatever pleases her, even though she's not allowed to go to the university. her late mother's influence? and what does she study? She and Vedero are friends, that's perfectly clear, like real friends, not the kind of friends Vedero doesn't actually like

- after the engagement she's Drazhadeise, so what, she has to move out of her father's residence, yes?

[mecurtin]

Lemme just say:

The thing that strikes me as weird about the setup is that the Emperor doesn't seem to have an official mistress. I mean, Maia's father had a string of wives, but doesn't seem to have had a series of mistresses, or a harem.

Yet how could this be? In particular, the status of an Empress isn't terribly stable -- she can be set aside, and she doesn't retain strong ties with her birth family. Yet in European history, one of the reasons for dynastic marriages was to cement ties between nations -- which can only occur if the woman keeps a connection with her family.

[laurajv]

Maia's maternal grandfather, on the other hand, DOES seem to have had a string of mistresses, or at the very least, one mistress.

I found the absorption into the man's family very odd, although...I mean, legally, married women were the property of their husband in our own history, so perhaps the closeness of ties to birth family has more to do with the person one marries than with any customs about connections? Arbelan called Varenechibel "a killing frost"; he seems to have been a rather unpleasant person who was pleased to get rid of any connections he did not much care for.

I was surprised Maia's grandfather seemed to care so much for him, when he would not even answer his daughter's letters. That struck me as awfully strange, and I feel like he, too, doesn't give much of a damn about women (though he seems to like his four natural daughters a good bit more than he liked Chenolo).

[kass]

OMG I will totally read this. I'm just saying.

[laurajv]

it needs to grow a plooooottttttttttttttt