bound

[kradeelav]

man i still can’t stop thinking about The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms.

it’s currently the only book to contend with Triple Zero as ~the favorite of all time~ (well, that and Lirael), which is … something.  gorgeously evocative worldbuilding and a kickass cast of characters?  blatantly *evil* lady antagonists that did heinous shit and didn’t need a weak-ass sympathy plot? hell yeah.  some hot as hell scenes that hit all the guilty tropes? fucK YES. 

ahem.

there, however, was one theme that the book had a laser-like focus on - and it’s one that i find incredibly fascinating, and want to expound on a bit.

specifically: immortal or near-immortal beings being bound or under some kind of mental leash, and all the (horrific) baggage that can come with that.

part 1:

basically - in a disturbingly large chunk of fantasy/sci-fi media, you see plotlines of beings - semi-immortal-human or supernatural - being bound or under control for decades and centuries, and it’s mentioned but never faced head-on.

it’s often in a more visceral way than being tossed in jail for a few years.  (Not intentionally demeaning the real-world consequences of prison, of course, but if we bend reality and put that comparison side by side, it’s - magnitudes - in difference, in a subtly horrifying way.  centuries of that loss of control starts to erode at identity itself, and often under handlers with cruelly imaginative minds? yeesh. )

Maybe, for instance, said beings can still walk around, but someone has passive control of their mind, and can use it at a whim.  Maybe they’re kicked out of the driver’s seat entirely, and they’re helplessly aware of their body being a puppet all along.  maybe it’s in the form of ‘being forced to follow certain orders ~for the good of all of us~’, but it’s orders that their consciences are screamingly, violently opposed to making -

(There’s a lot of fridge horror in those situations, just sayin’.)

And I don’t think nearly enough of those stories actually sits down long enough to think about the natural consequences of invoking that particular trope - not just the initial ‘forcing another sentient being to another’s will’ shtick -

- but how systematically stripping away complete mental agency for so long like that can truly fuck up a mind over time, and erode The Self, even if the “handler” was pretty mellow as far as ownership goes, and didn’t push them to do anything they technically wouldn’t.

( hellsing i am goddamn looking at you wrt: alucard/integra.  god, i love their dynamic but it is Truly Fucked Up when you think about it too long)

Who Are You, if who you are must be a mask to please your handler?  And if you must wear that mask for centuries on end?

The psyche warps and bends if left in that state for too long - and whoever they were is irrevocably altered because there /is/ no alternative.   You are who you must be to survive.

This post (dragon-age related, but very readable) is one I’ve always been reminded of that covers this phenomenon - that post is more about being bound by a … code, if that makes sense, with approvers than by someone directly -  but there’s a similar calculated wariness behind every action, a constant self-censoring to be sure that the line isn’t pushed.  

Because there is a very real line in the ground, when you invoke this trope, like it or not. 

 

part two:

(general warning for dubcon-ish mentions)

100k is all about power dynamics. 

100k is also all about those weird wiggy power dynamics between mortals and bound dieties.  there was one in particular - trying not to tread into spoilers - that, ah, also involved a bit of romancing.  (if you’ve known krad for more than a few months you know that i uh, kinna dig weird wiggy power dynamics in my ships, god help me)

ANYWAY

power dynamics - romantic power dynamics, since we’re focusing on that here - between mortals and dieties are always going to be lopsided, given the tremendous difference in scope of foresight, resources, knowledge, and sheer raw power at their fingertips.  (doesn’t stop us mortals from being Into It, though, that particularly lovely tradition goes all the way back to the pantheon and all the shit they got up to.)

however, making that party bound adds one hell of an interesting dimension to it.  it’s not equalizing the difference - two wrongs don’t make a right - but it sure does something with it.

what i fucking loved about this book is it didn’t try to skirt around how gigantically squicky it could’ve been, consent-wise. 

The majority of the book - and the beginning - was explicitly dedicated to dissecting that mess of issues first, long before any ~feelings~ started to emerge.  There was acknowledgement metatextually about the situation, there was explicit acknowledgement by both parties of how fucked up it was, and there was all-around a general respect for person-(being-hood) despite shitty circumstances, and -

( ah fuck it, i’m gonna talk spoilers - SPOILERS AHEAD)

Yeine - our mortal lady protagonist -  got to see how the gods (all of them bound) coped with it, how they absolutely clung to their own personalities, which were carefully hidden and preserved below their mask of unwavering subservience to the Arameri - the group of pure-blood nobles that they were bound to.  She got to empathize with them on an equal level (as much as could be) - especially with their point-blank hatred of the Arameri, which I think is important.  She understood that weird specific type of hatred born of survival against a particular group, and damn well wasn’t going to cut corners in bringing them to justice.

(One interesting thing the book does to mitigate the lopsided-ness is that Yeine was in a pact with the gods to free them, and she was figuratively under their leash as much as they were under hers.  Not to mention that they were both more or less sane parties that didn’t want to be in that mess any longer than they had to be, so you had everyone working for freedom.  that helps.)

(I could go on and on and say how having Naha - that strange daytime powerless, used cruel version of Nahadoth (god of darkness that Yeine interacted most with) - was also a very explicit nod to how fucked up the whole situation was (and to the trope in general because it was p easy to forget that Nahadoth too, was bound, just from how he acted).  It’s … interesting … that Yeine really didn’t have much interaction with that version, especially when it’s that version that got hit with the worst of the ‘must obey orders’ line.  Nahadoth more or less kept his personhood due to the outrageous amounts of power that simply couldn’t be wiped clean like a slate, wheras Naha .. not so much.)

(I could also have a marvelously fun time comparing 100k to how hellsing deals with this trope - hellsing’s ridiculously progressive in some way but oh dear sweet jesus, not with this.  )

but uh,

wow that was already a lot of words for one book

(it’s worth it tho)