Beyond Selidor

So, if someone asked me to list my top 5 fictional tropes of all time, romantic/sexual relationships between human characters, and non-human characters would definitely be number one — and it's probably been one of my favourite tropes since I first started reading fiction. Humans paired with vampires, deities, angels, demons, or some other kind of immortal (or almost-immortal) being — I'm not fussy, I love them all!

I think this is because most fictional romantic relationships, unless they're written as an established relationship, tend to have some kind of obstacle for the characters to overcome before they get together, and incompatible lifespans is a pretty fundamental obstacle, and it affects so many other things. (Apart from anything else, beings who do not die, and who have lived/existed for thousands or even millions of years, will have such a different understanding of history, humanity, mortality, the passage of time, and even morality than human beings, whose lives are finite.) I love seeing the way different pairings try to navigate this, and come to terms with their extremely different perspectives and experiences.

I also really like it if these relationships are depicted in such a way that it's clear the attraction is connected to these characters' utter difference (so the human character falls in love in part with the other's inhumanity, and the immortal falls in love in part with the human character's mortality) and that they change each other, slightly — the immortal becoming more human, and the human becoming more monstrous. I could read that trope forever.

On the other hand, I hate hate hate stories that try to resolve the inherent problem of such relationships (one character is going to die, and the other one will basically live on without them, forever) by turning the immortal character human, or giving immortality to the human character (e.g. getting turned into a vampire by their vampire boyfriend).

I love your title quote!

It's a quote from the first Katherine Arden book in the Winternight trilogy, and refers to the mortal/immortal relationship in question. I really love the quote too!

I do hope it'll show up online later too! It sounds really interesting.

I think she has said that it was recorded and will be uploaded at some point. When that happens, I'll link it on my blog.

Edited to add that she had internet problems and therefore it didn't get saved unfortunately.