dolorosa_12 | 'That love of maidens for monsters, that does not fade with time'

Someday I will have the mental energy for a proper Dreamwidth post, but that day is not today. Instead, this is something of a drive-by post to alert anyone that's interested to a live event that Katherine Arden is doing via Instagram tonight.

She's going to talk via Instagram Live (so it's a free event, although I would assume you need an Instagram account to watch) about mortal/immortal romance in fiction. Given that mortal/immortal romance is basically my favourite kind of fictional romance, and the specific mortal/immortal romance in Arden's Winternight trilogy is one of my very favourite examples, I am delighted.

Unfortunately, at 7pm EST this event is a bit too late for me (in the UK) on a weeknight, so I'm hoping it will be recorded, but for those who are interested, and in a better timezone, check it out! Arden's Instagram account is

arden_katherine.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

dhampyresa

I love your title quote!

mortal/immortal romance is basically my favourite kind of fictional romance
ooh, tell me more?

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

From:

dolorosa_12

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.

Edited Date: 2021-01-15 03:36 pm (UTC)

From:

lirazel

Love reading your thoughts on this!

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).

Oh, poor you! You must hate the majority of the instances of this trope in fiction because I feel like most of them take one of those two routes!

From:

dolorosa_12

You must hate the majority of the instances of this trope in fiction because I feel like most of them take one of those two routes!

Unfortunately, you're right. I'll read pretty much anything if it looks like there's going to be a mortal/immortal relationship involved, which means I have read a lot of dreck over the years. I keep a sort of mental list of the stories that don't end in the way I dislike. Offhand, the ones that don't take either of the two routes include the Winterheart books, Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik, Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon series, most of Holly Black's books (she and I seem to basically share a brain when it comes to this trope), and Samantha Shannon's Bone Season series (although this is incomplete and I'm a little dubious about where the relationship is heading, given some things Shannon has hinted at on social media). There's also an Australian fantasy series called The Chaos Crystal about a suicidal immortal which almost ends the way I want, but takes a turn into the bizarre and absurd at the last minute in a really frustrating way.

Weirdly, although none of the relationships in Buffy are particularly happy or healthy, it handles this trope pretty well in regard to Buffy's relationships with vampires (although of course because the relationships are also being used as metaphors for other things, there is tension related to stuff other than the fact that Buffy is human and her boyfriends are immortal). I also feel that if Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles hadn't been cancelled, it would have done interesting things with the trope as well.

What I really want to see (but for which I can't think of any examples off the top of my head) are stories about human beings falling in love with the deities that they worship, and the weirdness that would ensue, particularly regarding their own attitudes about religion. (I mean, you sort of get one half of this with Greek mythology, but it's not quite what I want.)

In any case, I keep seeking out these kinds of relationships in fiction, and very occasionally, I get what I want. I've also been fortunate enough to have a lot of people write fic for me about many of these pairings over the years!

From:

lirazel

What I really want to see (but for which I can't think of any examples off the top of my head) are stories about human beings falling in love with the deities that they worship, and the weirdness that would ensue, particularly regarding their own attitudes about religion.

Dude, yes! I would eat that up!

I've also been fortunate enough to have a lot of people write fic for me about many of these pairings over the years!

That's wonderful!

Have you read Hambly's James Asher vampire series? The romance between the main vampire character and James and his wife Lydia (I very OT3 them) is not explicit, but I feel like it's so aware of the differences between them because of Simon's immortality. It never forgets that vampires would be deeply weird and other. (So many vampires these days are just regular people who happen to drink blood.)

From:

dolorosa_12

Weirdly, I have not read Hambly’s vampire series, although based on your comment, and the summary I read of the first book, I really need to remedy that immediately. I LOVE vampires (mostly), and those novels sound really like my thing.

So many vampires these days are just regular people who happen to drink blood.

So true, and so frustrating!

From:

lirazel

If you already like vampires, I think you'll really like Hambly's take. I myself am not super into vampires--obviously, I love some vampire-related media like Buffy and Robin McKinley's Sunshine, but that's despite being about vampires instead of because of it. But I really, really like how Hambly interprets them. There's a scene in the first book that is my favorite vampire-related thing I've ever seen.

From:

dhampyresa

How do you square the human becoming more monstrous. with I hate hate hate stories that try to resolve the inherent problem of such relationships [...] giving immortality to the human character?

Your thoughts are super interesting, thank you. Do you have favourite examples?

she had internet problems and therefore it didn't get saved unfortunately.
Awwwww :(

From:

dolorosa_12

I should have explained myself better. When I talk about the human character 'becoming monstrous,' what I mean is that their outlook is changed, so they start to see the world less through human eyes than from the perspective of someone who has lived a long time and is unlikely to ever die (which, as I said in my previous comment, is likely to affect a person's perspective on history, mortality, morality, the passage of time and so on). I don't want them to actually become immortal or gain supernatural abilities (unless they had such abilities to begin with), I want their perspective to subtly change. Likewise with the immortal character — I don't want them to lose their immmortality, I just want them to gain a greater understanding of what it means to be human/mortal.

I listed a lot of my favourite examples above in my response to

lirazel: Miryem and the Staryk lord from Spinning Silver, Vasya and Morozko from the Winternight trilogy (give me ALL the stories about young women, and the death gods who love them!), pretty much every mortal/immortal couple in Holly Black's fiction, and Nick and Mae from Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon trilogy. And while I don't think the relationships were happy or healthy for anyone involved, I still have a lot of affection for Buffy and her various vampire boyfriends. I also wish that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles hadn't been cancelled, because I think the show was going to go to interesting places in terms of the relationship between John and Cameron.

My favourite of all is Warden and Paige from The Bone Season series, though!