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"oh hey im getting another gay coworker. and her girlfriend is so charming too, I can't wait for the 3 of us to hang out" - apparitor, probably

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #18 – Montress Volume 3: Haven by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda

I have been reading one volume of this comic a month, in part as a way to force myself to take it a bit slowly and appreciate the issues and volumes as distinct arcs and works in their own right instead of archive binging, and in part because a volume of comic books being more than ~20% of my reading goal for the year feels like cheating. This has accomplished both of those goals splendidly, but it is making it increasingly hard to come up with different ways of talking about the basic premise of the story. So I’m just not going to.

The plot picks up fairly directly where the last plot dropped off – with Maika having escaped the last maratime city-state she’d found refuge in (now wanted fugitive) and settling into the next one. To secure safety for herself and her little crew of misfits (eldritch god-monster her mom bore and raised her to be a host for, adorable fox-child she treats like shit, terrible cat who betrays everyone, improbably hot noble magic assassin whose technically supposed to be murdering her), she’s conscripted by the royal engineer to assist in repairing the ancient magical shield which protected the city during the last war – which, due to her heritage and the aforementioned eldritch god, she might be the only one capable of safely accessing. That (literally) blows up in everyone’s face just about immediately, and the remainder of the arc is spent scrambling to deal.

Dramatically the volume works very well as a self-contained narrative, though a decade of marvel movies have left me kind of incapable of taking a big climax involving an apocalyptic glowing hole in the sky that seriously. Beyond that though, this is definitely a Lore volume, digging deep into the history of the Shaman Empress, her relationship with Zinn, and what the other Montrum are or want. It also, if my memory is right, marks the point where Zinn finishes transitioning from this terrible quasi-unknowable parasite ruining Maika’s life and turning her into a walking atrocity to just, like, Some Guy. They’re a little shit with an improbably amount of flattering amnesia and also murder a bunch of people but like, they’re a character now. They banter with Maika constantly, and also keep fucking up and being wrong about things. Deeply endearing tbh.

This also marks the point where The Doctor and Maika’s paternal family more broadly starts being a lot more plot-relavent which, going to be honest, I’m kind of dreading. Can’t remember any real details but my memories of the whole upcoming arc basically boil down to ‘at least Maika got that badass clockwork prosthetic out of it’.

Kippa and Ren are basically irrelevant to the actual plot this time, which is totally fine because I love them both dearly and would have happily read an entire issue of them going shopping and having a nice day in the market. Kippa, besides being adorable, does actually get some pretty meaty scenes providing the view from the gutter here though – Maika gets scooped up by a scheming vizier engineer as soon as she walks into town, and also hates people, but Kippa is absolutely the sort of person to go wandering through a sprawling refugee camp doing whatever she can to help. Which is both good worldbuilding and characterization and provides some desperately needed grounding to keep the whole story from vanishing entirely into mythic freudian psychodrama.

Speaking of preferring the social and political storytelling – I’m not sure they ever actually matter, but I do love the two bit characters who occasionally get scenes of their desperate heroic spycraft and diplomacy as they try everything they can to prevent another war breaking out. Their little bit in this volume also does a great job illuminating what a broken mess the politics of the Federation is – given the incredibly vague 1930s-East-Asia analogy underlying the story’s geopolitics, I like that the genocidal power about to plunge the world into war is riven with internal contradictions and five minutes away from a coup with the army and navy barely able to stand in the same room without gunfights breaking out).

Anyway yeah, it’s still Monstress. Still good! I probably sound like a broken record saying it at this point, but the character design remains just sublime, even for very thoroughly secondary characters. Speaking of, my favourite one has now shown up!

[literary-illuminati]

She whispered to the dog statuette. It was oddly comforting to speak to the dog and hold it in her hand. She looked down at the way it sat, with its tail curled around its back legs, head up and forelegs straight, as if waiting for its mistress.

lirael cosplay / 📷 havecamerawillsnap

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She's so mean to this kid she just spent the last month trying to rescue.

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The way Kippa hugs her tail when she's anxious is just impossibly adorable

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<3

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Maika's Parents

Father: "You shall be the princess of the glorious cannibalism-fueled monster-warlord-cult-empire I shall conquer the world with! Have some people stew."

Mother: "9 months of pregnancy and a decade of childrearing was somehow the easiest way to get the exact subject/sacrifice/host I needed for this experiment to work."

[literary-illuminati]

You people are making me insane. New Adult is a genre invented so Sarah J Maas can put smut in books written at a 10th grade reading level. The Locked Tomb uses the word 'myriadic' in the first sentence. They are Sci-Fi/Fantasy novels, period. The second book features a second person POV and deliberate distortion of the timeline. They feature some of the most complex, layered writing happening in SFF today. The fact that the main characters are teenagers is a necessary part of the plot, not an indication of the maturity level

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rip to iruvage you would've done numbers on 4chan

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"Just, blatantly and forthrightly sketchy and untrustworthy side character who helps the protagonist ~60-70% of the time they show up" is such a great archtype.

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Maika being the daughter of two different types of pulp fantasy villains (and the granddaughter of a third, niece of a fourth) really does just make an immense amount of sense when you think about it.

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I honestly have zero idea how When the Angels Left the Old Country ended up on my TBR - it might literally just be because I kind of love the name? But 60 pages in it's really quite charming. Very tale/folkloric, and very clearly in deep conversation with a tradition I have only incredibly surface level knowledge of.

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Having read the Masquerade series multiple times, I thought I knew roughly what to expect from Exorida.

But Exordia does not read like Baru Cormorant.

Exordia reads like Douglas Adams and Scott Alexander had a teleporter mishap The Fly style, and then the resulting chimera was given a low dose of acid, locked in a padded cell with only a laptop, and told to write a scifi novel before they could come out.

Whether this is a good thing or not, I could not say.

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Finished Fevered Sun!

Not entirely sure what I think, honestly. I didn't mind it? Very readable, I like the setting, will probably read the sequel at some point. But like, feels like a failure of craft? I see what the book was trying to do, and it doesn't really manage it.

Fundamentally just goes to show you really can't do GRRM-style epic fantasy with a half-dozen POVs and then try to cut the book down to 380 pages, I think. Feels more like an outline or storyboard of key scenes that a finished story with all the necessary connective tissue.

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one of my favourite things is seeing posts like this that are clearly a reference to some fandom or piece of media, but having no idea what it’s referencing, so i’m just reading it like. yeah that would be weird huh

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I really do adore all the effort put into weird cool-looking character designs of what are functionally one-off extras.

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Textually it's a horrific paternal violation of her bodily autonomy but unfortunately Maika does look cool as shit with a decopunk robot arm.