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ASFTV B1Ch00 Reactions
Jan. 14th, 2024 02:06 amSo I've been listening to The Shadow Lover. I have no intention of sticking to any sort of schedule and I might start doing this with other books as well in between these as the mood strikes me, but for various reasons I've been really liking the idea of reading something and posting chapter-by-chapter reactions, instead of the very quotespastey, rapidfire way I usually tend to. (Not least because Swimmer isn't in my channel and trying to liveblog in more public places is generally not something I succeed at. Or, I suppose this is fully public but it's also very much my space so that's about the same.)
I'm starting this past midnight on a bit of a whim so even to the extent that it might already take me longer to read it than it took to write it the next one might be a while. I do intend to finish it someday but time will tell whether that's within the next decade.
A little background: ASFTV stands for A Song For Two Voices. It's a rationalfic of the The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey. I've read a fair bit of Swimmer's glowfic, but most of it was a couple years ago so I'm not entirely fresh. While I've never read any Valdemar stuff, I did read the first two books of Lackey's The Mage Wars series a few times in high school, which are a far prequel. (It's too 1am for me to confirm but from glowfic memory I think it's about two thousand years between them.) (And yes, just the first two, largely because I'm really not a fan of next-gen stuff.) This left me very surprised the first time I realized Leareth was Ma'ar! Had not at all realized he was a comically evil villain in canon, a true inspiration to us all.
Onto the actual reaction!
Right off the bat I gotta say that I'm a huge fan of the split reality type thing happening with the slashes; I'm a real sucker for that sort of thing and I think it's a great bit of intrigue to kick things off with.
Trying reeeal hard to remember who Gala is. She's not Tran's Companion because all the Groveborns are dudes, and she's not sad. - Oh, she's Tylendel's, oh no. Has she ever shown up in glowfic (that I've read)? I feel like she did once or twice. Maybe in Osirion.
From a personal stance it's really funny to read "brown as the mud by the side of a river" coming right off of Stephenie "Cambodian monastery ceiling" Meyer. I do like the specificity, though.
Now I'm remembering the first Swimmerthread I read, which of course the one with Vanyel and Cam in Milliways, and I just thought Yfandes was a basic killjoy nanny character and now I'm like. I woulf daevafy for this horse. Yfandes is really good actually, 10/10 horse of the year at minimum.
The idea of characters who have enough future vision to already know and love someone before having ever met them is fantastic, incidentally. I'm kind of unclear to what extent this is truly happening here versus just being the Lifebond and some less concrete visions, but it's still cool.
~Prediction Lightning Round!~
Back to parareactions, one thing that surprised me but should not have is that it got a lot easier to do this when I remembered it was on AO3 and I could just open it there, instead of digging up the copy on my beloved e-reader. Much to consider wrt how to make reading easier for myself.
The MVP for this chapter is: Slashes! As in the punctuation mark.
I'm starting this past midnight on a bit of a whim so even to the extent that it might already take me longer to read it than it took to write it the next one might be a while. I do intend to finish it someday but time will tell whether that's within the next decade.
A little background: ASFTV stands for A Song For Two Voices. It's a rationalfic of the The Last Herald-Mage series by Mercedes Lackey. I've read a fair bit of Swimmer's glowfic, but most of it was a couple years ago so I'm not entirely fresh. While I've never read any Valdemar stuff, I did read the first two books of Lackey's The Mage Wars series a few times in high school, which are a far prequel. (It's too 1am for me to confirm but from glowfic memory I think it's about two thousand years between them.) (And yes, just the first two, largely because I'm really not a fan of next-gen stuff.) This left me very surprised the first time I realized Leareth was Ma'ar! Had not at all realized he was a comically evil villain in canon, a true inspiration to us all.
Onto the actual reaction!
Right off the bat I gotta say that I'm a huge fan of the split reality type thing happening with the slashes; I'm a real sucker for that sort of thing and I think it's a great bit of intrigue to kick things off with.
Trying reeeal hard to remember who Gala is. She's not Tran's Companion because all the Groveborns are dudes, and she's not sad. - Oh, she's Tylendel's, oh no. Has she ever shown up in glowfic (that I've read)? I feel like she did once or twice. Maybe in Osirion.
From a personal stance it's really funny to read "brown as the mud by the side of a river" coming right off of Stephenie "Cambodian monastery ceiling" Meyer. I do like the specificity, though.
Now I'm remembering the first Swimmerthread I read, which of course the one with Vanyel and Cam in Milliways, and I just thought Yfandes was a basic killjoy nanny character and now I'm like. I woulf daevafy for this horse. Yfandes is really good actually, 10/10 horse of the year at minimum.
The idea of characters who have enough future vision to already know and love someone before having ever met them is fantastic, incidentally. I'm kind of unclear to what extent this is truly happening here versus just being the Lifebond and some less concrete visions, but it's still cool.
~Prediction Lightning Round!~
- "Somewhere, a baby takes her first breath and cries; she does not yet know that she is loved, or what love is." I feel like this isn't Yfandes but I don't have a better guess than Yfandes.
- "Somewhere, a young man in green with flaming red hair holds a silver-haired woman as she weeps." This sounds like Stef and Savil; idk a specific incident.
- "Somewhere a forest burns." This sounds awfully book eleven-y. I tried to avoid B11 spoilers for a long time but I think I did not successfully leave unspoiled that there's something to do with a forest. Or maybe it's the end of this one?
- "Somewhere, lightning flashes over a raging river." I'm gonna say this is either a Van drowning incident or like, the specific and important instance of Van not drowning. On a tower. - Probably there isn't a river in that one?? I don't recall ever hearing of one. My money's actually on something that I don't know about.
- "One shard is constant: mountains, falling snow, a place far from here. A pathway carved by dark magic, that must not be crossed. She stands with him, her Chosen, she will not let him face this alone." I get no points for this one :Þ
Back to parareactions, one thing that surprised me but should not have is that it got a lot easier to do this when I remembered it was on AO3 and I could just open it there, instead of digging up the copy on my beloved e-reader. Much to consider wrt how to make reading easier for myself.
The MVP for this chapter is: Slashes! As in the punctuation mark.
