Warhammer: Drachenfels by Jack Yeovil
Feb. 29th, 2016 06:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethWarhammer is an irredeemably ablist setting. Visible difference is inevitably a sign of chaos, and warps bodies, minds and morals. The moral model of disability is in full effect and it's damn creepy.
In this particular book there's a poor pitiable mutant who looks like a Dwarf but is only a dwarfed human, who starts becoming more and more mutated, and he ends up killing himself to avoid acting on the impulses he feels. That's the closest the model allows to an honorable mutant. So it's sad becoming a mutant, but also involves the inevitable destruction of self, either by death or moral degeneration.
Plus 'madness' operates very much on the gothic horror mode where you fail your rolls and are lost forever. This is no mental illness, this is the triumph of evil inside the skull. And once again, suicide is the only way out.
Creepy.
So it ought to be really easy to put this on the 'nope' pile. But, actually, not so much easy, because this book has what so many of the books I've been reading lately utterly fail to: Female characters. Half a dozen fully speaking thinking choosing female characters. And a few more when I think hard.
It passes the Bechdel test effortlessly, on the way to doing something else, as a way of illuminating the powers and personality of one of the point of view characters, Genevieve the vampire. Her vampire 'grandmother' beats her at cards because she's been using their powers longer. Passed. The vampire is the main female protagonist, who takes a stand against the forces of actually evil undeath. She doesn't kill to feed, she's all sexy 'kisses' instead. But she's not a one note character, she's got a bunch of complexities about living for so long and she gets to kick a lot of arse in a fight.
One reason there's so many women is the book has a bit of a cast of thousands going on, and characters are initially very broadly drawn near stereotypes to get us into the story fast. Introducing that many that often is not simple. Also I say near stereotypes because this book was written in 1989 and that means a quarter century of books written by people who may well have read this one, so for all I can tell it was being novel. But it's likely they're adventurer tropes, on purpose, because this is a story about story and the telling of it, and what you start with is not what it appears.
Drachenfels is the name of the monster, the Great Enchanter Constant Drachenfels, undead.
But it's also the name of the play the main male protagonist is commissioned to put on about the defeat of Drachenfels. A play that becomes more of a re-enactment, only it uncovers a whole lot that was not in the standard retellings of the original.
So along the way it's a book about the power of stories, and how the tropes mislead them, and how hollow heroism can be. Warhammer is a grimdark world and again I usually hate that, but it seemed pretty well balanced, considering. Plus, no rape. I mean, if a book's major plus point is no rape then that's a problem, but it has many good points and no rape. Nothing is done to the female characters that isn't also done to the male. So it's tolerable to read.
And along the way it's just a bit about what true heroism actually is, and about the Warhammer, the symbol of that one hero the Empire these days considers a god. So it pokes the central religious conceits of the 'verse, and comes up with something hopeful, from a different angle than you'd expect.
It's also very, very, very messy indeed. Blood, gore, a tour of body parts that would not usually be on display and yet are now all over the dinner table. One review I read said the book weren't very scary, just gory. But to get that impression they can't have read it grimdark gothic, where the true horror isn't only what is done to you, but what you could become. Victims of Drachenfels become his servants. Right up until the final confrontation, falling to the darkness means becoming the monster in the dark. Discovering who exactly willingly embraces that is the level where there's horror.
And that's why the protagonists are a vampire and an actor.
It's about who they pretend to be, and what happens when you scrape that surface.
But that's also why it's difficult to ignore the mess that is the moral-and-physical rules of the 'verse, because if you happen to object to the idea that victims are tainted by what has happened to them, you're going to spend much of the book wanting to throw it.
However, the way I read the final confrontation, it does in the end work out, because it comes down to the fact that they're wrong in that belief, and the victims can in the end destroy their abuser and be free. The ones that willingly embrace evil are screwed, but the ones that die trying to fight it have just had to fight longer. ... several thousand years longer. ... it's really really dark.
So only read this if grimdark body parts everywhere becoming the monsters horror is something you're actually looking for. But for what it is it has an interesting number of female characters, doing a variety of things. And the thing with the play and how it's about heroism and the stories about heroes? That it did pretty well.
I'll keep this one to read again later.
... despite having many many objections to the setting.
In this particular book there's a poor pitiable mutant who looks like a Dwarf but is only a dwarfed human, who starts becoming more and more mutated, and he ends up killing himself to avoid acting on the impulses he feels. That's the closest the model allows to an honorable mutant. So it's sad becoming a mutant, but also involves the inevitable destruction of self, either by death or moral degeneration.
Plus 'madness' operates very much on the gothic horror mode where you fail your rolls and are lost forever. This is no mental illness, this is the triumph of evil inside the skull. And once again, suicide is the only way out.
Creepy.
So it ought to be really easy to put this on the 'nope' pile. But, actually, not so much easy, because this book has what so many of the books I've been reading lately utterly fail to: Female characters. Half a dozen fully speaking thinking choosing female characters. And a few more when I think hard.
It passes the Bechdel test effortlessly, on the way to doing something else, as a way of illuminating the powers and personality of one of the point of view characters, Genevieve the vampire. Her vampire 'grandmother' beats her at cards because she's been using their powers longer. Passed. The vampire is the main female protagonist, who takes a stand against the forces of actually evil undeath. She doesn't kill to feed, she's all sexy 'kisses' instead. But she's not a one note character, she's got a bunch of complexities about living for so long and she gets to kick a lot of arse in a fight.
One reason there's so many women is the book has a bit of a cast of thousands going on, and characters are initially very broadly drawn near stereotypes to get us into the story fast. Introducing that many that often is not simple. Also I say near stereotypes because this book was written in 1989 and that means a quarter century of books written by people who may well have read this one, so for all I can tell it was being novel. But it's likely they're adventurer tropes, on purpose, because this is a story about story and the telling of it, and what you start with is not what it appears.
Drachenfels is the name of the monster, the Great Enchanter Constant Drachenfels, undead.
But it's also the name of the play the main male protagonist is commissioned to put on about the defeat of Drachenfels. A play that becomes more of a re-enactment, only it uncovers a whole lot that was not in the standard retellings of the original.
So along the way it's a book about the power of stories, and how the tropes mislead them, and how hollow heroism can be. Warhammer is a grimdark world and again I usually hate that, but it seemed pretty well balanced, considering. Plus, no rape. I mean, if a book's major plus point is no rape then that's a problem, but it has many good points and no rape. Nothing is done to the female characters that isn't also done to the male. So it's tolerable to read.
And along the way it's just a bit about what true heroism actually is, and about the Warhammer, the symbol of that one hero the Empire these days considers a god. So it pokes the central religious conceits of the 'verse, and comes up with something hopeful, from a different angle than you'd expect.
It's also very, very, very messy indeed. Blood, gore, a tour of body parts that would not usually be on display and yet are now all over the dinner table. One review I read said the book weren't very scary, just gory. But to get that impression they can't have read it grimdark gothic, where the true horror isn't only what is done to you, but what you could become. Victims of Drachenfels become his servants. Right up until the final confrontation, falling to the darkness means becoming the monster in the dark. Discovering who exactly willingly embraces that is the level where there's horror.
And that's why the protagonists are a vampire and an actor.
It's about who they pretend to be, and what happens when you scrape that surface.
But that's also why it's difficult to ignore the mess that is the moral-and-physical rules of the 'verse, because if you happen to object to the idea that victims are tainted by what has happened to them, you're going to spend much of the book wanting to throw it.
However, the way I read the final confrontation, it does in the end work out, because it comes down to the fact that they're wrong in that belief, and the victims can in the end destroy their abuser and be free. The ones that willingly embrace evil are screwed, but the ones that die trying to fight it have just had to fight longer. ... several thousand years longer. ... it's really really dark.
So only read this if grimdark body parts everywhere becoming the monsters horror is something you're actually looking for. But for what it is it has an interesting number of female characters, doing a variety of things. And the thing with the play and how it's about heroism and the stories about heroes? That it did pretty well.
I'll keep this one to read again later.
... despite having many many objections to the setting.