Immortals Quartet fanmix: Fair Strange Lover

[lotesse]

The Boy's been reading Tamora Pierce's Immortals Quartet. Oh gods above but I loved - love - those books so much. I read them for the first time as a little teen, and they were just so completely the thing that I wanted. Awhile ago, thefourthvine wrote a gorgeous meta on being part of the audience - the Immortals books were one of my first real experiences with being front and center in a writer's audience. To this day, I still have a strong desire to draw little tiny hearts around Tamora Pierce.

So he's been reading them, and we've been talking about them, and I seem to have nerded out and made a ship fanmix. Um.









Blackbird, Dove
{the beginning of a story: Take these broken wings and learn to fly/ All your life/ You were only waiting for this moment to arise}

Kywitt! Kywitt! Caprice
{Daine: fairytale birdsongs}

Animal Instinct, The Cranberries
{Daine: And the thing that freaks me out/ Is I'll always be in doubt/ It is a lovely thing, the animal instinct}

Girl and Her Horse, Carbon Leaf
{Daine: With no words to say/ A girl and her horse can communicate}

Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall, Simon & Garfunkel
{Numair: I don't know what is real/ I can't touch what I feel/ And I hide behind the shield of my illusion}

Lover Lover Lover, Leonard Cohen
{Numair: I said, Father change my name/ The one I'm using now it's covered up/ with fear and filth and cowardice and shame}

Apprentice of the Universe, Pure Reason Revolution
{Numair: and give me something to dream about, I'm tiring/ I'm cold & I want to go to sleep}

Falcon, Martha Tilston and the Woods
{Wild Magic: these days of inbetween are something I could do without/ down, down and I swoop down, remind me how freedom feels}

Fallen Icons, Delerium
{with the wolves: no hounds to guide me no army at my back/ I'm gonna stand up/ this is how/ you made my heart a hunter}

Blood and Fire, Indigo Girls
{growing up: I am intense, I am in need/ I am in pain, I am in love/ I feel forsaken, like the things I gave away/ Blood and fire/ Are too much for these restless arms to hold}

Teachers, Leonard Cohen
{doubts & fears: Some girls wander by mistake/ into the mess that scalpels make/ Are you the teachers of my heart?/ We teach old hearts to break}

Bird on a Wire, k.d. lang
{companionship: If I have been unkind/ I hope that you can just let it go by/ If I have been untrue/ I hope you know it was never to you}

The Old Ways, Loreena McKennitt
{godborn: Like a bird in a cage spreading its wings to fly/ “The old ways are lost,” you sang as you flew/ And I wondered why}

Time After Time, Cyndi Lauper
{friendship: you say go slow/ I fall behind/ the second hand unwinds/ if you're lost you can look and you will find me/ time after time}

If I Fell, Across the Universe
{Carthak: If I give my heart to you/ I must be sure/ From the very start/ That you would love me more than her}

Atropine, Rainier Maria
{Daine loses her temper: Have you got any magic tricks/ That will work for me?/ 'cause my baby is in the ground}

Gravity, Vienna Teng
{falling: Hey love/ That's the name we've long held back/ From the core of truth/ So don't turn away now/ I am turning in revolution}

Deep Water, Jewel
{passion: And when you're drowning in deep water/ And you wake up making love to a wall/ It's nothing without love}

The Crane Wife pt. 3, The Decemberists
{love: Each feather it fell from skin/ 'Til thread bare while she grew thin/ How were my eyes so blinded?/ Each feather it fell from skin}

Let's Do It, Ella Fitzgerald
{epilogue: Birds do it, bees do it/ Even educated fleas do it/ Let's do it, let's fall in love}

Comments

[starlady]

Oh, The Immortals quartet. I think they're the best of Pierce's Tortall books so far, with the possible exception of Beka Cooper, the last Kel book, and the first Allie book.

No, okay, I love them all too much to choose, but I love Daine/Numair so much. Apparently Pierce got lots of negative feedback for the age difference, though? Let's discuss that, I never really had a problem with it.

Downloading, in other words, thanks!

[lotesse]

Okay, riffing on the age difference:

I feel like the ship addresses one of the problems I've always had with teen-saves-the-world stories: the fact that these worlds expect kids to shoulder major burdens, to grow up too fast and put themselves in mortal peril and make hard choices, without granting them access to, yanno, the actual good parts of being a grownup.

Daine doesn't get to faff around the way so many of us did at sixteen; instead, she's out working herself to the bone (oh dear pun). Her world expects her to be an adult, with adult responsibilities, and she lives up to every one of those expectations. So, okay, she can't have sex?! As she does pretty much live as a small adult, her peer group includes other adults. Those are the people she lives and works and fights with - and so very naturally those are the sorts of people she finds herself falling for.

I am maybe biased on this - I met The Boy when I was sixteen, and back then our three-year age difference was actually kind of a Big Deal. But hey, I was taking college classes, so very naturally I ended up with a college-age partner.

Now that I have written a novel! I think I will stop. Erm.

[starlady]

No, this is a good novel!

That's a really good point about Daine's peer-group--you see that right from the minute she hits Tortall, really, she's hanging out with Alanna and George and the royal family.

And, yeah. What is with our society having such a strong thing against age differences in relationships? It was the norm so recently.

[lotesse]

I suspect it's down to increasing levels of age segregation in general. Because I do kind of feel like college seniors going for highschool kids is skeeze - their life experiences are so dramatically different. All of our progressions happen in regards to age, so your peers and your agegroup tend to be the same.

But there's no hard reason why people of different ages couldn't be more mixed together - and in those kind of situations, I feel like crossgen or age-divided relationships are actually pretty natural. If it's not predatory in that "find me an inexperienced girl I can dominate" way, I got no fuss.