Jennifer Stoy's Interesting Shares

Twilight’s Dawn
Anne Bishop, 2011

I propose a new fantasy law, which shall be known as Stoy’s Law: as any fantasy series approaches N, where N is the final entry in the series, the chances that the series has is essentially fanfiction has reached 1 at series entry N-1.

We might also call this “Anne Rice’s Law” but let’s not be entirely uncharitable.

What follows is very spoilery for the book, so it’s behind a cut.

SPOILERS LIKE WHOA

Twilight’s Dawn is pure fanfiction. Hell, it ends with babyfic of a very particular sort that I never thought would get straight-up published. But unlike many other pro-fantasy writers, Anne Bishop is actually a pretty ballsy fanfic writer who doesn’t try to puss out of the facts of her universe out of fear of the fans or the brand. Jaenelle Angelline is from a short-lived race, Daemon Sadi is not. There’s no “well, except if said person is Witch” exception or weird new form of Guardian or anything like that. Jaenelle Angelline dies and Sadi marries Surreal after he knocks her up. It all more or less works out, and everyone broods a lot. Fin.

And I gotta admit, as a former fanfic author, it delights me that Bishop pulled off an “unconventional” ship as her endgame, complete with annoyingly named baby (Jaenelle Saetien? Shit, Erin Blair couldn’t have done better if she’d tried) and bittersweet happy ending. Lots of pro authors are surprisingly bad at this sort of thing; if you can handle the genre, you’ll be like, “hey, this is a good version of this.”

I do admit that the reason it works is that somewhere halfway in the middle of Queen of the Darkness, Bishop seemed to realize that Surreal was the best female character in the series by a long shot, and for me, the second best behind Lucivar because Surreal and Lucivar respond to all the lovingly-rendered rape and torture and emo in the universe with an attitude of “this is fucking lame, let’s KILL IT WITH FIRE instead.” And the end game develops out of this realization. Hence why Surreal suddenly has more and more screen time after that and Jaenelle less and less.

But again, to give Bishop credit, that’s because Jaenelle’s story was essentially done and was only partially successful. You can read the Black Jewels book as a way of handling “The Problem of Superman,” ie, how do you create conflict in a story where the lead character is so powerful there shouldn’t be conflict? And it…75% succeeds there? But Jaenelle is just not that interesting (especially if you are underwhelmed by lovingly tortured heroines with crazy psyches), especially once she’s got her Ebony jewels and we know she’s finally going to put the beat down on Dorothea and Hekatah. There’s a reason Queen of the Darkness spends half the book on Jaenelle and Daemon finally doing it, because a) Anne Bishop can’t write action scenes, and b) of course Jaenelle will find a way to destroy the bad guys without killing everyone.

Anyway, back to Twilight’s Dawn. If you know Bishop, there’s nothing THAT surprising. “The High Lord’s Daughter” is ballsy fanfic, but it IS fanfic and Daemon/Jaenelle shippers are going to shit bricks over the resolution, never mind how it was set up. Surreal people will generally like this, as will Lucivar people. If you’ve never read these books, this is a terrible place to start.

And that’s really that.