bloodygranuaile

I’ve been terribly, terribly exciting to be following along with Mark Reads, even more than usual, since Mark has finally started Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. I have adored the crap out of Discworld since I first discovered it in… um, ninth grade? And there are now forty books in this series. Which means that, while I consider myself a pretty big fan and to have a pretty good grasp of Discworld, since I have spent so much time reading Discworld over so many years, there are actually a ton of things I’ve forgotten and am looking forward to rediscovering, since most of these books I’ve only read once or twice.

We’ve just gotten through the first book in the series, The Colour of Magic, and I am revising my opinion of this book from three stars to four. I didn’t read this book first when I started Discworld, so it struck me as being underdeveloped and episodic—and it is, compared to the later works, when more worldbuilding has been done. However, going through it slowly, pun by glorious pun, rather than ripping through the whole thing in one sentence, both made the episodic nature less obvious, and reminded me how absolutely glorious the puns are, even right at the very beginning. The turtle thing is truly bizarre, and I hadn’t thought to stop to think about quite how much bizarreness is squished even into just its first introduction (THAT BIG BANG PUN), having spent ten years being just like “Yeah it’s on a turtle lol”. Rincewind is never boring, even sans potato obsession. And the Luggage… the Luggage is perfection itself.

Ze plot, for the uniniated: Rincewind, an expert coward and gloriously failed wizard, is hired as translator and guide for Twoflower, the Discworld’s first tourist, an inn-sewer-ants analyst from the mysterious and wealthy Counterweight Continent. Rincewind is also tasked given a stern lecture on inflation by the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork and tasked with making sure this tourism thing doesn’t catch on and that Morporkians don’t all decide to go get gold from the Counterweight Continent. Then there’s fire and fighting and running away, and then dragons and shipwrecks and running away, and basically a ton of absurd wacky hijinks that take them all over the Disc, particularly as they run away. And that is ze plot. Sort of. Plot isn’t really the point; groanworthy but clever puns and making fun of popular eighties fantasy tropes are the point.

Basically, it’s a pretty mediocre Discworld book, but even a mediocre Discworld book is better than most other books.

I feel like every one of my book reviews these days is starting off with “For (X) book club…” I may be in too many book clubs. Is three an unusual number of book clubs to be in? Oh well.

Anyway. For the SF/F meetup book club, the book this month is Saladin Ahmed’s Throne of the Crescent Moon, which I think might be part of a series but works perfectly well as a stand-alone novel. Going into this book, I pretty much knew that 1, it was a fantasy novel of some sort, 2, Saladin Ahmed is sometimes funny on Twitter, and 3, from the title and cover art I figured it the world would be sort of Middle-East-based more than Europe-based.

I was pretty dead-on regarding #3. The worldbuilding is pretty decent considering it’s the first novel in a series and it clocks in at less than 300 pages; I think I’m a bit spoiled about worldbuilding these days… there’s a part of me that wants to be like “Wah it’s not as fleshed out as, for example, Tortall” but then I remember that there are seventeen Tortall books and it’s not very fleshed out in just the first one either. The Crescent Moon kingdoms are essentially Ye Olde Medieval Arabia, which can be a nice change from the continual flow of Ye Olde Medieval Western Europe books in the genre, but I would also probably not be able to put up any kind of specific counterargument if you told me it took place in the same universe as Disney’s Aladdin. (Maybe the lack of musical numbers.) It’s a vivid and accessible kind of Ye Olde Medieval Arabia setting, full of the food porn we’ve all come to expect of the fantasy genre, brief mentions of other lands outside the Kingdom’s borders, and intriguing tidbits about a fallen prior civilization with ill-understood magic. The fallen prior civilization is transparently a sinister take on Ancient Egypt, even up to the name, Kem (Kemet was the name for Egypt in Ancient Egyptian). I, for one, definitely want to hear more about Evil-Magic-Ancient-Egypt in the upcoming books.

The political situation in the Crescent Moon Kingdoms, and in particular its enormous capital city of Dhamasawaat, is tenuous. The current Khalif is cruel, greedy, and entirely self-absorbed, and the city is stressed to the breaking point under his callous mismanagement. (This mismanagement includes causing massive traffic jams that last half a day or more. THIS IS BAD FOR YOUR POLITICAL CAREER, just ask Chris Christie.) A flamboyant, Robin-Hood like figure calling himself the Falcon Prince has shown up to steal from the rich and give to the poor, give bombastic speeches, interrupt public executions, have fabulous moustachios, and that sort of thing. As one would expect, he is a very polarizing figure.

In the middle of this political unrest, a bunch of people are getting murdered in very nasty ways—hearts torn out, souls devoured, that sort of thing. The murders don’t have anything to do with either of these political factions—they are the work of some monsters: mostly ghuls, but also a nasty shadow creature called a manjackal, who is surprisingly whiny and talks about himself in the third person. The main plot follows our band of heroes as they try to fight the ghuls and the manjackal, and to find and kill whatever sorcerer is raising these creatures before he can drown Dhamasawaat in rivers of blood and steal the Crescent Moon Throne from its two current contenders.

Our band of heroes consists of three to five people, depending on how you want to count—the book jacket only mentions three but I think it’s pretty obviously five. Our protagonist is Doctor Adoulla Makhslood, who is not actually a doctor kind of doctor; members of his particular order of ghul hunters are called Doctors by tradition. (I’m not sure why. Possibly the author just likes the title “Doctor.” If so, I cannot actually fault him for this.) Adoulla is getting too old to be a proper ghul hunter—he’s about seventy—and he really just wants to retire with his books and drink cardamom tea and marry his ex-girlfriend Miri, a madam who doubles as a sort of extragovernmental spymaster around the city. Adoulla also enjoys trading insults with his friends, complaining about how old and fat he is, and making fun of his assistant, Rasheed. Rasheed bas Rasheed is a dervish of some extremely puritanical holy order or other, whose entire purpose in life is to be the perfect weapon of God. To this end, he helps Adoulla kill ghuls, but spends most of his time being scandalized over one thing or another and fretting about the inevitable conflict that crops up when his list of pious rules and proscriptions bumps up against how life actually happens.

While hunting ghuls, Adoulla and Rasheed meet Zamia, the last member of her particular band of the Badawi tribe, who were all slaughtered by the ghuls and manjackals and other horrors raised by the Mysterious Evil Sorcerer. Zamia can turn into a lioness. She and Rasheed almost immediately have awkward feelings about each other that neither of them wants to deal with, as they are both so impressed with how unbearably serious the other one is. (Adoulla, of course, endlessly makes fun of them for being soulmates in stick-up-their-butts-itude, otherwise they’d probably collapse into a black hole of humorlessness.) Zamia joins up with Adoulla and Rasheed so that she can get vengeance for her tribe. When the three of them are attacked in Adoulla’s house (which is supposed to be impossible) by the manjackal and a couple of sand ghuls, Zamia is injured and the house burns down, so they team up with two of the Doctor’s old friends and neighbors, a married couple consisting of a magus and an alkhemist. (…The vaguely Arabified spellings of words that are common in English language fantasy annoyed me a little at first, but eventually I got used to them. The same cannot be said of Microsoft Word, which keeps trying to correct the spellings to “ghouls” and “alchemist.”) The rest of the plot is a pleasant mix of all the things that make fantasy-adventure fun—unravelling old curses on old scrolls, almost getting killed by thuggish guardsmen, more monsters, magical healing, treasonous plots, unlikely allies, some musings on class warfare and the duties of kings.

The one thing notably missing from the usual roster of Stuff What Goes In Fantasy Adventure Novels is “interesting pantheon of gods,” in either its definitely-real-because-they-show-up-and-mess-with-people incarnation (see: Tortall) or the don’t-show-up-therefore-people-squabble-over-them incarnation (see: Westeros). In the Crescent Moon kingdoms, everyone is monotheistic. Period. The culture is steeped in religion, with the common speech patterns heavily peppered by God references regardless of the level or type of personal devotion of the speaker. While the details of the religion are a bit vague, despite the extensive quotations from its holy texts, one thing is clear: it’s the most monotheistic version of monotheism I’ve seen in a long time. (It isn’t Islam; it’s definitely a fictional religion. It seems to fit within the moral strictures typical of Abrahamic monotheistic religions—there’s definitely a bit of a purity culture thing going on with some of the holy orders—but it doesn’t draw on any specific rituals of any real-world religions that I’m aware of.) The deity-level characters are God, a Lucifer-like figure called the Traitorous Angel, and what sounds like an undifferentiated host of other Angels. There aren’t even any particularly noteworthy Prophets named. Personally, this didn’t really work for me because I think monotheism is absolutely boring as fuck. I can only even handle historical medieval-Europe-y stuff that’s heavily steeped in Christianity because medieval Europe’s version of Christianity—Catholicism—is practically half-pagan in its endless roster of named Angels and Saints, not to mention that its one God is three characters. (I grew up Catholic, and when I started questioning Catholicism, one of the reasons I could never seriously consider switching to a more liberal Protestant church is because Protestantism is so incredibly boring, just God and Jesus and Satan and nobody else.) So while the cast of monsters, evil sorcerers, shape-shifters, people with various magical powers, and other down-on-the-ground-level myths is fabulous, I couldn’t help but feel that there was a bit too much theism for how mono it was.

Overall it was a fun, quick read; but… that didn’t entirely work for me. I’ll be very interested to see if the sequels end up providing more depth to the world and the characters, because, while I like a good escapist monster-hunting adventure now and again, for some reason I feel like this book should have been less fluffy than it was—I wanted more, although it’s hard for me to put my finger on precisely what it is I wanted more of, whether it was worldbuilding or characterization or explorations of power systems, but I definitely wanted more depth of some sort.

I had the privilege of buying Elizabeth Bear (matociquala)’s Range of Ghosts directly from the author, along with a few of her other books. She is one of the many awesome people I met at Readercon, so I was happy to pay for shiny signed new physical copies plus shipping rather than buying an ebook, even though I’ve never read any of her other stuff.

I do not regret this decision at all.

Range of Ghosts is a political fantasy and it’s based largely on the medieval Middle East and Asia. A major theme is the rise and fall of empires; the empire that owns most of the known world at the time of this story is the Qersnyk Khaganate, which is largely based off the Mongol Empire—the Qersnyk are a culture made up of a number of nomadic horse tribes from the steppe. The Khaganate is facing civil war after the death of the Great Khagan. Other kingdoms, empires, and former empires—some subject to the Khaganate; some on its borders—have their own cultures and their own reactions to the war within the Khaganate. How closely these other kingdoms seem to be based on other Asian and Middle Eastern cultures varies, or possibly my familiarity with the cultures in question does. The different cultures and the different factions within the political houses are all well-characterized and clearly differentiated. As far as I can tell, there are no white people in the entire book.

My familiarity with Mongol history is very limited, so around the time I began reading this book I also listened to a five-part Hardcore History podcast called “The Wrath of the Khans,” and learned stuff about Genghis Khan and his heirs. It was both educational and disturbing, because welcome to history.

One of our protagonists is Temur, grandson of the Great Khagan, and now the heir with the most legitimate claim to the throne, as his cousin has killed off his elder brothers while trying to seize the position. The cousin is named Qori Buqa, which personally frustrates me, since I noticed that Qori Buqa seems like it would be pronounced close to Cory Booker and I am like “Noooo Cory Booker is awesome; this cannot be the bad guy” but that’s all me. (I voted for Cory Booker TODAY. Yay!)

Our other main viewpoint character is the Once-Princess Samarkar, who, after arranging to be widowed, tries to remove herself from the vicious political situation in the Rasan Empire by becoming a wizard. The process for becoming a wizard of Tsarepheth involves a surgery to remove her ovaries; wizards must be infertile for their magic to manifest. Samarkar is awesome; more on that later.

The worldbuilding in this book is often really creepy, in a good way. The skies are different over each country, and change to reflect changes in political borders and leadership—so when the Khaganate takes over another land, their sky changes to the Qersnyk sky, which features a personal moon for each member of the ruling family (this provides a handy guide for who is still alive at the end of every day). The magic that can be wielded by humans comes in ways that require high costs and intense training—wizardry can only come when the body has lost its ability to procreate, and seems to be largely based on manipulating elements with one’s will. Sorcery, which is much more sinister, seems to be mostly blood magic, and frequently involves killing people. In addition, objects can be cursed or ensorcelled. The dead must be sent along to the afterlife with whatever prayers and rituals are required by their culture, or else their ghosts stick around and can be manipulated with sorcery, which is bad news, because when ghosts attack you they can suck out your life/warmth/energy, and they can only be repelled with salt.

After surviving an absolute massacre of a battle (even by battle standards), Temur hides his identity for a bit as he and his awesome horse take up with a bunch of refugees, and he develops a relationship with a badass young Qersnyk woman named Edene, who also has an awesome horse. When Edene is abducted by a huge army of scary-ass blood ghosts, because she is too badass to get abducted by anything less, Temur, accompanied by his and Edene’s awesome horses, goes in search of her. It is on this quest that he meets Samarkar, out on her first real wizarding assignment to the city of Qeshqer, which, it turns out, has been completely depopulated and its people’s bodies used for more creepy sorcery. Everything beyond this is entirely too complicated for me to sum up but suffice to say that there is a creepy blood-magic murder cult that is trying to deliberately sow war and kill people, including Temur, and they have Edene.

Edene gives us more insight into the creepy murder cult as she becomes a viewpoint character. I almost just wrote that she is my favorite viewpoint character except that’s not true—no one character is my favorite viewpoint character because the really great use of viewpoints here is in the way they all play off each other. So we get the inside view of the creepy murder cult from both Edene, the outsider, and a guy known as Al-Sepehr, the sorcerer who seems to be our main villain (one of them, anyway. It’s complicated). And when Temur and Samarkar are travelling together, which is for a pretty big section of the book, the narrative keeps switching back and forth between both their viewpoints. All the viewpoints are very distinct and shaped strongly not just by their narrator’s individual personalities (the way we think of personalities, in terms of traits and general attitudes)  but are also very clearly rooted in their personal experience, particularly in terms of their knowledge of and experience of different geographies and cultural practices, etc.—some characters have seen oceans before and some haven’t; some have never seen desert; the Qersnyk do not have the custom of kissing so this is a weird foreign custom to them (it is apparently true in the real world that some cultures do not have kissing, at least according to a bunch of the anthro texts I used to read for Pearson; this is one of the things I cannot get over thinking is really weird); the steppe characters feel claustrophobic in enclosed mountain holdfasts and the mountain characters feel lost and exposed on the steppe. It helps that the characters are very well-realized, and often fairly sympathetic to modern reader biases in terms of their values and priorities, so it’s easy to get into their headspaces, and then it cramps your poor modern brain to be in the headspace of someone who is thinking about all sorts of complicated, advanced political scheming one minute and, like, boggling over the existence of pillows the next. I love it.

I have the book in trade paperback, but I strongly suggest buying it in hardcover so the next time you run into an asshole who claims that “politically correct” fantasy about anyone-other-than-white-dudes is boring, you can more easily beat them to death with it. I have no idea where this series is going except that I am pretty sure somebody will die at some point because so far this book doesn’t pussyfoot around, and I don’t want anyone to die because everybody is awesome. (Seriously, I am Mark Does Stuff levels of unprepared.) I will probably pick up the second book in October when I will be attending a book signing for Elizabeth Bear and her adorkable boyfriend Scott Lynch (author of The Lies of Locke Lamora, which I read in August). Then I will have all the awesome signed books and everyone had better be jealous.

Hey y'all, it is time for me to talk about the Beka Cooper trilogy! These three books, collectively known as the Provost's Dog series, are entitled Terrier, Bloodhound, and Mastiff. I have already reviewed Mastiff on this blog when I first read it, which just coincidentally happened to be when Occupy Wall Street was kicking off, which you can tell in the review.

Anyway. The Provost's Dog books take place about two hundred years BEFORE the beginning of the Song of the Lioness quartet, and Beka is George Cooper's something-great-grandmother (there are some interesting bits of character backstory that we learn to explain why George still has Beka's last name even though he's descended from her in the maternal line). Tamora Pierce definitely made Beka Cooper's Corus seem like a different time period than Alanna's Corus, including being less socially progressive in a lot of ways (there is still slavery, for instance) although there is less Women Are Super Delicate stuff going on--the Cult of the Gentle Mother is a social influence that is pretty new and gaining power during this series, which I think is awesome, because backlashes/regression, they really do happen. There is also lots of fun with medieval slang! This takes some getting used to, but overall I think it ends up being a lot of fun, particularly the swearing. The swearing is wonderful.

These books are big compared to the earlier ones, clocking it at around five or six hundred pages apiece. This is good, as it allows a lot of room for elements of Literary Fantasy, such as listing delicious-sounding foods, describing what everyone is wearing, and talking about going to the bathroom. Also the aforementioned swearing.

On a more serious note, there are also BIG CRIMINAL CONSPIRACIES that Beka and her partners have to unravel because they are AWESOME MEDIEVAL COPS. And many of them are ladies! I cannot even deal with how many awesome lady cops there are in this series, from bit characters like Desk Sargeant Kebibi Ahuda to Beka and one of her partners, a veteran Dog named Clary Goodwin, who is just awesomely cranky and completely zero-bullshit. Goodwin especially shines in the second book, where she and Beka go to Port Caynn to try and unravel a counterfeiting conspiracy. (Tunstall is sadly at home in Corus with broken legs in this one.) There is also another lady knight, Lady Sabine of Macayhill, because it would be cruel for Tamora Pierce to give us a whole series without any awesome lady knights. There are some pretty cool nonmilitary women as well, like Beka's friend Kora the hedgewitch, and Serenity, who runs a lodging house in Port Caynn and just keeps randomly being awesome.

Beka, in addition to being a policewoman, is also a sort-of mage; she doesn't have the Gift, but she has the ability to hear the spirits of the dead when they ride on the backs of pigeons (pigeons are the messengers of the Black God, apparently), and she can also listen to dust spinners, which apparently hold bits of conversation and want to dump them off on somebody else (it makes more sense in the book).

I don't want to go into the plots because it'd be hard to say much of anything without giving it all away, but the basic premises are: In the first book, there's a possible serial killer who kidnaps small children for ransom and kills them if the parents don't hand over their prized possessions, plus someone is hiring crews of diggers who then mysteriously disappear; in the second book, somebody is producing large quantities of counterfeit silver coins and they seem to be coming out of Port Caynn; in the third book, somebody has kidnapped the heir to the throne and hidden him as a slave, plus the realm's mages are in a big snit.

I really do have a lot to say about these books but I don't really want to end up writing another 8-page review. Maybe someday I will go back to school and do a paper on Pierce! That would be the best paper-writing experience I think I could ever have.

So, I am still way behind on this blogging thing!

Many moons ago a friend lent me a copy of King Arthur and His Knights: Selected Tales so I could exercise my brain a bit after reading too much new teen fiction; this particular set of Arthur tales is exerpts directly from Sir Thomas Malory with the spellings barely modernized. The archaic language was a joy to read and I felt all intellectual an' shit reading it on the subway. For some reason the footnotes came in repeated cycles of being labeled 1 through 12, which I found amusing. (I am easily amused.)

This collection starts off with a nice long introduction that is almost as fascinating as the tales themselves, which tells us a bit about the structure and content of the French legend cycle that Malory's Morte d'Arthur is adapted from. It also tells us a bit about courtly love and Malory's life and all that other fun stuff.

The book is rather short, running at only about 230 pages, so the excerpts really are just snippets--the book doesn't hold much of a narrative arc, although the Death of Arthur is, quite suitably, at the end. The Holy Grail stuff is very minimal, which is occasionally confusing. The storyline with the most page time seems to be Lancelot's, which actually adheres quite closely to the version presented in "The Once and Future King" (or, more accurately, TOaFK adheres closely to the Morte d'Arthur).

While this is undoubtedly a work of Great Literature, it is also an illustration of how bugfuck crazy everyone was in the early middle ages; a lot of the storylines involve knights trying to kill each other randomly, and then equally as randomly deciding that (a) it's all ok, just a little misunderstanding, lol, no big or (b) it is totally unacceptable to have fought my relatives just because they were trying to kill you, now we will have a blood feud between our families where we just all keep killing each other's sons and brothers and cousins for no reason for ever and evarrrr. Apparently, this is just how knights roll.

All in all, this is a good book to read if you are not yet ready to tackle the entire Morte d'Arthur, which many of us probably never will be. I hope to read the whole thing one day, but probably not anytime soon.

So last year I read Deborah Harkness' debut novel A Discovery of Witches, which is a paranormal romance about a witch and a vampire who fall in love and do wacky research about supernatural genetics and alchemy. The sequel came out last week, and I wanted to read it enough that I was willing to shell out the fifteen dollars that it costs ON KINDLE because fucking Amazon.

Anyway. It was very good, although, due to the generally impressive level of historical and linguistic research, I was extra annoyed on the few occasions I found things to nitpick (or at least thought I found to nitpick) that were not satisfactorily explained, the main one being the same thing that drove me up the wall last time, which is Matthew's insistence upon having an English first name even when he is having French middle and last names. Apparently, we get exactly one reference to the fact that "Matthew" has an alternate form in French per book. I do not understand why. We spend more time hearing Matthew being called "Matthaios" in this book than "Mathieu," even though Vampire Matthew (I now just call him Vampire Matthew because I don't want to deal with all the names) is not Greek at all, but Philippe is super pretentious and he will call Matthew by any goddamn name he wants to matter what language we're speaking.

...It bugs me as much as it does because the rest of the language stuff in the book is so good. Miraculously, Diana's German is about the same level of rudimentary as mine, so every time German shows up I am about as confused as she is! It is awesome. And there are fun and accurate smatterings of a whole ton of other languages scattered throughout the book, which makes me super happy.

So, at the end of the last book, we found out Diana was a timewalker, and she and Vampire Matthew were preparing to timewalk to Elizabethan England and find Diana a witch to help her figure out her magic powers now that she is not spellbound anymore, and to hunt down the elusive, enchanted alchemical manuscript Ashmole 782, and hopefully eventually solve Diana's parents' murder. This book kicks off by timewalking to Matthew's Old Lodge in 1590. The first half of the book is a little slow plotwise, with occasional unsuccessful forays into trying to find Diana a witch to teach her and little mention of Ashmole 782. Most of the plot in the first half is dedicated to further developing Diana and Matthew's romance, which readers who care about that sort of thing might like a bit more than I did (I used up all my ability to give a shit about people's brooding, guilt-ridden, possessive vampire boyfriends several years ago). If you are not super invested in the romance, it is helpful to be super invested in learning all sorts of crazy shit about Elizabethan England and whatever else the author feels like showing off that she researched, because, like in all of the bestest time-travel stories, Diana has Ye Olde Culture Shocke, and spends a lot of time adjusting to life in early modern Europe at great length and in great detail. Diana, being a historian, basically treats the first several months of time travel as one enormous hands-on research project, learning how to run a large, upper-class sixteenth-century French manor household. (They travel to Sept-Tours. Which is in France. Everyone speaks a lot of French. Everyone calls Matthew either "Matthew" or "Matthaios" and... yes, this irritates me a lot.) They also get married again (this is the third time; in the first book they do a neopagan handfasting and a modern French common-law marriage) at Sept-Tours, so that the author can show off just how many marriage customs she has researched, and also they spend the entire winter there, so we can learn about all the early-modern French harvest and winter rituals and celebrations. It is incredibly fascinating if you don't mind that the plot is barely moving forward at all.

In the second half of the book, we get back on the quest for witch mentors and Ashmole 782, and hang out with bunches of historical figures, some of whom turn out to be actually not human (and some of whom are really annoying, I am looking at you, daemon Kit Marlowe). We chase Ashmole 782 to Prague, because Prague is big in modern gothic novels (it is apparently very sexy), to the court of a lecherous Hapsburg king who is not very bright and is massively petulant, and there is all sorts of douchey court-drama power-playing, which I love (note: I would have been totally eaten alive in any aristocratic court ever. I could never pull that shit off; I'm not quick enough. I think that is why I like reading about it so much).

I don't really want to talk about the alchemy-related plot twists that show up because it is spoilery and pretty much some of the awesomest stuff in the book, and also I'd probably fuck it up. But let's just say I'm really hoping the third book spends a LOT more time on alchemy and Ashmole 782 and less time on history fun facts, even though I like history fun facts.

Also, in this book, Diana spends more time being awesome and snarky and less time being fed tea and eggs and freaking out about stuff, so that is an improvement. There are some real attempts to deal with the "vampires are possessive like whoa" part of the vampire myth without just glamorizing possessiveness as super sexy and not abusive at all, so +1 for feministiness, although I still think that I would never be able to be a vampire romance heroine. Also, there is an awkwardly meta conversation about the trashiness of modern vampire novels, which beats the usual habit of treating the Bela Lugosi Dracula movie as the most modern iteration of the vampire myth to compare everything to, but at the same time comes off a little bit as being "Look, my book is better than all the other vampire romances, see how I can criticize them!" and then I am like "Oh, go find Ashmole 782 already, Jesus Christ."

Also, due to time travel, BONUS VISIT FROM DIANA'S DAD. And of course, bonus weddings conducted by Matthew's dad. Maybe the third book will have more stuff about both of their moms? I love stories about moms.

Overall, I thought this book was very good, although I admit I made fun of it through almost the whole thing, because that is how I roll with vampires these days.

Due to my moderately embarrassing obsession with Showtime's lavishly ridiculous pseudohistorical drama The Borgias, and also because it's free on Kindle, I read Rafael Sabatini's The Life of Cesare Borgia. Rafael Sabatini is better known for writing swashbucklery novels such as Captain Blood--yes, the one that was made into an Errol Flynn movie.

This book was written in 1912, which means it is adorably overwritten, and full of bits in foreign languages that aren't translated and Mr. Sabatini's personal opinions on everything. Mr. Sabatini has ALL THE FEELINGS about the Borgias and the way they have been treated historically, so this book really is not so much a chronicle of the life of Cesare Borgia as it is a massive takedown of everything that had ever been written about any of the Borgias prior to 1912.

One of the things that amused me about this book is that Mr. Sabatini either really wants to be Cesare or, possibly, just really wants Cesare. I was not expecting this because the only supposed portrait of the real Cesare Borgia I have ever seen is this:



Which, seriously, look at that fuckin' Hohenzollern chin. Do not want. But it appears Mr. Sabatini, through a time warp of some sort, has been watching the same Cesare Borgia that I've been watching on Showtime, which is this one:



or, y'know, possibly this one:



Style tip, Mr. Sabatini: It is not necessary to reference "the duke's lithe and comely body" or even call him "the handsome young duke" at every opportunity, particularly when you are talking about, like, military strategy and stuff. And it is really not the standard way of referring to historical persons in nonfiction accounts, no matter how sexy they were (although my job might be more entertaining if it were).

Mr. Sabatini's gigantic mancrush on Cesare aside, the book provided much entertaining information about how generally fucked up the Cinquecento was, and as far as I know, some of it may even have been accurate! Most of the rest of it basically boils down to whining "THEY WEREN'T THAT BAD, YOU GUYS, STOP BEING SO MEAN" but in poncy 1912 diction. He makes Roderigo Borgia, better known as Pope Alexander VI, sound kind of like President Obama: most of the stuff that sucked about him is actually the exact same stuff that sucked about pretty much everyone with political power at that time, but he had a streak of not being quite as bigoted and hateful and anti-science as a lot of his political opponents, so there was a lot of screaming about how he was a JEWISH MUSLIM PAGAN SATANIST because that totally makes sense. According to Sabatini, Roderigo's main mark against him as Pope was that he was just too effective at using the Papacy to build up a worldly dynasty for his children, which was actually something the last several Popes had been trying to do; they were just all bad at it. He also did ~terrible~ things like refrain from kicking the Jews out of Rome, allow a Muslim prince to hang out in Italy for years, and, in a heretical display of believing in science, send physicians instead of priests to investigate a claim of stigmata.

Lucrezia Borgia is not in this narrative all that much because, according to Sabatini, in real life she was actually wicked boring and didn't do all that much. I think I like fictional dropping-light-fixtures-on-people Lucrezia better. However, Caterina Sforza was genuinely a BAMF, and was known as the "Tigress of Forli" for her military adventures, so she shows up a lot and reading about her is lots of fun.

Overall, not quite as quaintly lolarious as anything by Montague Summers, but much more in English.

I finished Tamora Pierce's Mastiff nearly a week ago but I have been hesitant to review it, partly because I have busy playing Castleville working but also partly because there is no way I will be able to improve upon Alyssa Rosenberg's excellent review "Tamora Pierce's 'Mastiff' and the History of Social Change" at ThinkProgress. Also, it took me a week to calm down from going "Squeeeeeeeeeee new Tamora Pierce squeeeeeeeeeeee!"

Mastiff is about the slave trade. One of the things I really liked about this book is that the slave trade in Tortall is not based in scientific racism about the inferiority of black people to the degree that it drowns out all other considerations, so we get to look more at every other aspect of why slavery is wrong and has always been wrong and is horrible than I think most USians are really used to. It avoids the boredom that would be inevitable with a thinly-veiled American History Redux, and I also think it ends up making a sort of companion piece/apology for the Aly books (known in my head as "Tamora Pierce's Guide to Being a White Ally with Specialized Helpful Knowledge in an Anti-Colonial Revolution Without Being a Total Asshat About It"), which talked a lot about colonialism but really soft-pedaled on the main character getting sold into slavery, if I recall correctly.

This version of slavery has a lot more to do with class, right of conquest, the desperation of poor parents with too many kids in economic downturns, and--in a Very Timely Fashion--the nasty results of having a small class of people with inordinate amounts of power and money who are exempt from the rules. The slave trade, in this book, is a tool used by Tortall's 1% (nobles and mages) to aid them in their plot against the Crown, and their anger at the Crown comes from the threats of being held to even the tiniest amounts of accountability or responsibility (sound familiar?). In this case, the Crown has, for apparently two or three years now, been mitigating some of the privileges of the nobility to gratuitously exploit their commoners (for example, during the food shortage a few years before, the Crown allowed people to buy grain directly from the Crown storehouses, instead of selling from the storehouses only to the nobility so the nobility could sell it to their vassals at incredible markups). The final straw that led to the mages getting on board with treason was the horrible, shocking, deeply insulting proposal that magecraft be treated like a craft--subject to licensing and regulation. (My currently very #occupied brain was all like "MAGES=EXECUTIVES AT LARGE FOR-PROFIT BANKS AMIRITE?!?! I SEE WHAT U DID THAR") So they kidnap the Crown Prince (who is four), sell him into slavery, and cast some sort of weird spell on him so that every pain that he feels the King and Queen feel too.

Personally, I feel this is a dumb plan on their part ("THE KING AND QUEEN ARE ENGAGING IN ~CLASS WARFARE~ BY TREATING OUR INDUSTRY LIKE IT'S AN INDUSTRY OR SOMETHING AND GENERALLY BEING INSUFFICIENTLY APPRECIATIVE OF HOW MUCH BETTER AND DIFFERENT SOME CLASSES OF PEOPLE ARE THAN OTHERS. LET US INCREASE THEIR SYMPATHY FOR THE PLIGHT OF THE MOST OPPRESSED GROUP OF PEOPLE IN OUR COUNTRY BY LITERALLY MAKING THEM PHYSICALLY SYMPATHETIC, AND HAVING THE CROWN PRINCE LITERALLY WALK SEVERAL HUNDRED MILES IN THEIR SHOES. THIS WILL TOTALLY GET THEM ON OUR SIDE") (I exaggerate; they were quite past trying to convert the King at this point, but man did this plan leave them no room for a Plan B if the deposition didn't work out) but it provides one hell of an awesome adventure for Beka (newly bereaved, wherein "bereaved" means "feeling guilty that her fiance died right as she was planning on breaking up with him"), Tunstall, a weird mage named Farmer Cape (in my head, Farmer Cape is played by Charlie Hunnam), the Lady Sabine, and, of course, Achoo and Pounce. A completely Lord of the Rings amount of plot is devoted to running and running and running, but the periodic escapades that break up the running from the running are actually very plot-building and cumulative and not episodic at all. Yeah, I know that's really vague. The lack of episodic-ness (episodicity?) means I'm not comfortable telling you any of it because it's all spoilers.

The other major Specter of Modern Politics that I may be making up but which I could not avoid seeing anyway is the rise of the Cult of the Goddess as Gentle Mother, which I found very interesting and awesome in previous books both for the hilarious "Uh, yeah, suuuure" reaction from the cast of professional female badasses like Beka and Goodwin, but also for its portrayal of another historical fact that most Americans are stubbornly unaware of, which is that social progress does not only ever move forward (Sidenote: Martin Luther King, Jr. has the most amazingly stinging rebuttal of the fallacy of thinking that the passage of time itself has magical socially progressive properties. I have concluded that the "I Have a Dream" speech is completely overrated, and that "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" is exhibits A through Z on Why Martin Luther King Jr. Was A Total Badass). In this book,  the Cult of the Goddess as Gentle Mother gets about as suddenly louder and more reactionary as the rise of our current crop of "Government So Small It Fits In Your Uterus" Congressional Republicans. And in many instances, its portrayal is as cartoonishly hilarious as a Republican Presidential candidate debate. Lady Sabine in particular kicks delicate silk-skirted butt in manipulating the tropes and values of the Gentle Mother cult to serve the ends of the Hunt.

In other news, this book has more references to excretion than the entire A Song of Ice and Fire series thus far. It even includes a discussion about what law-enforcement lifestyles allow for different levels of comfort and utility in keeping what sorts of objects in which body cavities (apparently, if you are a runner, everything chafes eventually). While reading, I kept thinking "Man, Tamora Pierce's YA books have gotten a lot less Y and a lot more A since Alanna: the First Adventure." This is fine with me, as I am much older than I was fifteen years ago as well (otherwise I would be Edward Cullen), but I kind of have to wonder if someone picking up Alanna at the same age I did and then reading all of Pierce's opus in a month (which is how I tended to read things back then) would maybe have an experience less like my own joyful discovery of Pierce and more like my slightly traumatizing discovery of the Anne Rice Vampire Chronicles in eighth grade.

As Alyssa points out, this book also does a fabulous job of illustrating the learned helplessness, fatalism, and slow poisoning of the mind that happens to people who live under and around ubiquitous oppressive systems for long periods of time, and its effect on people who really are totally morally against this sort of thing, or really do hate living under it. I am afraid I cannot discuss this any further without giving away major, major huge spoilers, so you should probably go read the book. And you should read Terrier and Bloodhound first, if you haven't already, because books are better when you know what's going on.

So... I finished rereading all four A Song of Ice and Fire books. Much like the first time around, they were long, but not long enough for me, and they were alternately hilarious and horrifying, and they were rockin' the dark an' gritty thing hardcore-style, and they were full of surprising plot twists that made me fall out of my chair and go "WHAT WHAT NO YOU DIDNT" and yes, that happened even though I'd already read the books before. See, the two best things about this story is (a) it is immense and complicated to the point where your average 200-level history course looks oversimplified, and (b) it is chock full of really surprising trope-exploding (or sometimes just awesome) twists. This means that there are big, important, heart-stopping, cruelly ironic twists that I'd managed to forget over the past two years because there are just that many. I had forgotten which of my favorite characters died, in some cases. I was trying to have a conversation with Josh about the series at Faire, and we kept talking past each other, because I'd totally forgotten what happens to Arya after she kills the singing Watchman, even thought that is kind of a big deal, and Josh had forgotten the missing piece of the story about Tysha that Jaime tells Tyrion, even thought that is also a big deal. Although I guess both of these things happen at the end of Crows so there hasn't been much follow-up to either of them to make them stick in our brains. At least we both remembered which Starks are dead and which ones aren't (and which ones are, uh, kind of both).

Attempting to explain what A Song of Ice and Fire is about is nearly impossible. It will take me forever, and I really can't even start telling you much of anything plot-related at all without giving away some of the most delicious twists, because it is that twisty. More or less, it's about a multi-factional civil war in the fictional Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, a land heavily patterned off late fourteenth/early fifteenth-century Europe except that everything is bigger and older and longer. Far to the North of the Seven Kingdoms lies the Wall, a seven-hundred-foot-tall structure of ice that separates the Seven Kingdoms from the icy northlands, where live wildlings ("uncivilized" people) and from whence there is emerging a vague threat of scary ice zombies, called White Walkers or Others. These things haven't been seen since something called the Long Night, several thousand years ago. You'd think that fighting the ice zombies and preventing another Long Night would be the top priority in this story, but actually, pretty much nobody gives a shit except the actual men of the Night's Watch on the Wall, because, in true real-people fashion, most of the rest of the kingdom is busy scheming, making ill-thought-out power grabs, hating on each other, and basically sucking at life. The King, who was apparently some sort of Conan the Barbarian type back fifteen years ago when he rebelled and took the throne from the aptly named Mad King Aerys (who liked to roast people in their own armor and fun stuff like that), has become a silly and temperamental old drunk who, despite the realm's general prosperity, has driven the crown six million dragons in debt to feed his taste for throwing big tourneys and stuff. He has a superlatively beautiful but even more superlatively bitchy Queen, Cersei Lannister, a member of the most rich and assholish family in the realm. Cersei has two brothers: the dashingly handsome and hilariously smug Jaime, known as the "Kingslayer" because it was he that actually gave old Mad King Aerys the chop, and the clever but sadly birth-defect-laden Tyrion, known as "the Imp" because he suffers from an unfortunate combination of dwarfism, hunchbackedness, misaligned legs, mismatched eyes, and general ugliness. Their father is Tywin Lannister, the meanest hardass in the entire kingdom, who is so wealthy he is rumored to shit gold.

King Robert's bestest childhood buddy was Ned Stark, now the Lord of Winterfell, the northernmost part of the kingdom. He has a wife, Catelyn, originally from the Riverlands, who is mostly awesome except the fanbase all hates her because she dislikes Jon Snow. Ned has six kids: Jon Snow is his bastard from some woman he refuses to talk about, and there is a lot of speculation that Jon might actually not be Ned's at all but his dead sister's, which would be just the sort of cruelly ironic thing GRRM would do, because that would render all of the otherwise-kindly Catelyn's years-long dislike of him irreversably misplaced. Ned and Catelyn have five trueborn Stark kiddies: Robb, the eldest, is basically the sort of dude a lord's son should be like, and is just and fair and charismatic and a good fighter and stuff. Sansa, the elder daughter, is a silly little thing who likes stories about brave knights and fair damsels and all that other fairy-tale shit, and would probably have a room plastered in Disney Princess paraphernalia if she lived in our world. Arya is the tomboy: bad at sewing, good at swordplay, likes making friends with her social "inferiors." Bran is the fourth child and second boy; his trademark personality trait is that he likes climbing all over the outside of the castle, which is unfortunate as somebody throws him out a window within the first hundred pages, but that is okay because he eventually ends up being the only Stark that has any bloody idea that he's a warg and goes about properly training for it. Rickon is a baby; he's not very interesting. Early in the story they all find pet baby direwolves, and they all form very strong attachments to their wolves, which is because they are actually all wargs even though most of them never figure this out.

Your other main group of characters is on a different continent. The two youngest children of the dead Mad King Aerys are Viserys, who is kind of a douche, and Danaerys, his teenage sister whom he sells/gifts to a Dothraki (grassland horselords; basically Mongols) khal named Drogo in exchange for the promise that Drogo's army will help him reconquer Westeros. Things do not go according to plan AT ALL, but I will not tell you how.

These are all your main characters in like... the first quarter of the first book. All of them remain extremely important throughout the series, although how alive they remain varies greatly. Later on we meet awesome people like the eunuch Varys, master of whisperers; Lord Peter "Littlefinger" Baelish, the master of coin; Stannis and Renly, King Robert's very different brothers; Ser Loras Tyrell the Knight of Flowers and his frequently wed but supposedly still maiden sister Margaery; and Brienne of Tarth, a ridiculously tall woman who everybody in Westeros hates because she's ugly and gender-subversive (she is a knight!), but who everybody in the fandom loves to pieces because she is so incredibly awesome.

The plot is a complex mess of enmities and alliances, battles and betrothals, magic and plain old human stupidity and greed. In brief (very very very brief!), A Game of Thrones concerns Ned Stark's appointment as Robert's Hand of the King, and his attempts to figure out who murdered the previous Hand and why. A Clash of Kings covers the escalation of the War of Five Kings; A Storm of Swords, the biggest, starts to focus more on the fragmentation and strife within each faction of the war and escalates the magic and the really weird alliances. A Feast for Crows is largely about the rise of several queens following the chaos and multiple regicides at the tail end of the War of Five Kings, and the widespread devastation from the war and autumn. Also, winter is coming.

George R. R. Martin said his intent in this series was to combine fantasy with history and historical fiction; Rolling Stone claims ASoIaF invented the genre of the "realpolitik fantasy novel," and various other people smarter than me have attempted to describe this series in a number of different ways. This series is NOT just a regular doorstopper fantasy with extra grit and grimdark pasted on. This story is a weird mix of being an epic high fantasy and being a searing metacritical commentary on everything wrong with the fantasy genre.

This is most evident in the character of Sansa, Ned Stark's eldest daughter. Sansa is silly. Sansa believes in silly shit. Sansa believes in the sorts of tropes that show up a lot in fairy tales, myths and fantasy epics that aren't explicitly supernatural but are still, basically, fantasy, in that they are unrelated to any type of realistic worldview. Over the course of the series, Sansa repeatedly finds out the hard way that things Aren't Like They Are In The Songs.

Now, I read a lot of  fantasy, and I think a lot of it is pretty good, and one of the things that makes good fiction good is that there is some sort of truth buried in it. That said, genres tend to lend themselves to basically telling the same type of stories over and over again. So the truths that fantasy has tended to be "about" over the years are limited: David and Goliath stories are the moral keystone of the genre, or, as Galadriel tells Frodo, "Even the smallest person can change the course of the future." The importance of friendship--lifelong, undestroyable friendship--is another popular theme, giving us memorable pairs and small groups of characters such as Sam and Frodo, Merry and Pippin, and Legolas and Gimli in The Lord of the Rings; and Harry, Ron and Hermione in Harry Potter. Children's and YA fantasy tends towards strong messages of questioning adult authority and the virtues of inquisitiveness. These are all great things. However, due to Western fantasy's basis in European Medieval fairy tales and most people's general historical illiteracy, fantasy frequently tends to uncritically regurgitate some pretty medieval worldviews.

1. Black and White morality:  of the Big Sweeping Epics particularly have a clearly defined side of Good and a clearly defined side of Evil, with the side of Evil usually being widely identified with the modifier "Dark" and more often than not characterized by extreme ugliness or terrifying imagery. Sauron the big flaming eye, with his grotesque Orcs and burned-out wasteland of Mordor, fits this trope. Lord Voldemort, despite his beginning as a handsome young regular dude and the whole theme of his having once been basically just like our hero, fits this trope during the "present" of the series.  The Dark is Rising series is literally just about the Light versus the Dark, with the Light rarely seeming in any way nicer than the Dark, it's just that the Dark is Dark because they're Dark and they like, y'know, power and murdering everybody and stuff. ASoIaF, on the other hand, might have some scary ice zombies on the periphery, but mostly you have a lot of morally gray people squabbling with each other. Some individuals suck more than others. Throughout most of the series the reader tends to be pretty pro-Stark and anti-Lannister... except for Tyrion. And eventually we lighten up on Jaime. And sometimes you can even feel bad for Cersei, shrieking cartoon harpy bitch that she is. Also, Tommen and Myrcella are adorable... You end up rooting for Tyrion's efforts to succeed on the Battle of the Blackwater, even though he's working for his family (and we hate his family, even Tyrion hates his family) and we know that Stannis actually does have the claim to the throne (and Ned tried to give the throne to Stannis! And Ned was our hero!) and... yeah. Like most wars in history, this one just happened because there was a throne and everybody wanted to sit on it, and from there it got pointless.
2. Feudal-agrarian absolute monarchies are a totally functional and non-oppressive way to run a society: Yeah, there's a reason we stopped having the Middle Ages as soon as we remembered how. ASoIaF might be about the game of thrones, but it spends a lot of time with the "smallfolk" and the way that the feudal system makes their lives terrible and the total pointlessness of leige loyalty. The songs may sing about Robert and Rhaegar battling it out nobly on the banks of the Trident for the woman they both loved, but in these books we also get the story told by one of the other thousands of men in that battle, in this case a former potboy armed with a sharpened hoe or some shit who was there because his landlord was leige to some lord who was sworn to some lord who was sworn to either Rhaegar or Robert, and this dude doesn't even remember what side he was on, because what the hell does he care if Rhaegar stole Robert's girlfriend? But if certainly uprooted his entire life and killed half his family.
3. War is glorious: Songs about noble and brave battles have been around forever, particularly in warrior societies (I had to translate some bloodthirsty doozies out of Anglo-Saxon back in my History of the English Language class) but I still largely blame Tolkien for its unrelenting prevalence in modern fantasy. Tolkien was a veteran of World War One, a technological mess in which soldiers dug themselves into dank trenches and dropped mustard gas on each other, and ground was very rarely actually captured or gained, and soldiers were at least as likely to die of trenchfoot and stuff than to actually get killed in battle. The impersonal miserableness of this new type of warfare sparked nostalgia for the old type of warfare as being more active, or more noble or honorable or something, like there's some sort of virtue to riding out to meet your enemies on the field face-to-face and getting your hands dirty having to actually kill them yourself individually. This sounds all well and good and it may have been marginally better than fighting in World War One, but war stays the same more than it changes. Traditional medieval fighting was brutal, messy, frequently pointless, involved a lot of boring positioning and making camp (and sometimes seige, which must have been just as dull as trench warfare), and basically involved thousands and thousands of unwashed men and their masses of camp followers (which involved cooks, laundresses, and other support staff, not just prostitutes) camping out for ages, eating the land bare and producing lots of refuse, and catching and spreading nasty diseases. You were still just as likely to die of bloody flux or an infected scrape as you were to get cut down nobly in battle. Also, even the armies of "good" guys didn't just wage war on the enemy leader and his soldiers--land gets plundered when it's conquered, civilians are slain (particularly when cities are taken), rape is a frequently used tool of war. It's not unusual to target an enemy's supply lines or support staff before or even instead of engaging the troops in battle. Your troops and bannermen are entirely likely to desert, change allegiances, refuse to rally in the first place, break and run away and become outlaws the second it looks like the battle's going badly for your side, not have any idea who you actually are or why in hell you're fighting, or be completely unaffected by your cinematastic pep talk about how one day the world of men may fall but it is Not This Day. Particularly when you are not actually fighting to save the world of men; you're fighting because there are rumors that some snotty boy-king's parentage is suspect. War also tends to disrupt harvests and cause mass displacement and famine.
4. Knights have honor: No. No they don't. Really. Chivalry is totally optional for knights. The ability to sit on a horse and kill people is the main requirement.
5. The flip side to Knights Have Honor, Damsels Are Fair And In Distress And Everybody Totally Respects Them, See, We Gave Her A Flower: One of the big draws of ASoIaF for a lot of women, and part of the reason it has such a huge female fanbase, is that Martin really puts a lot of effort into showing exactly what is horrible and miserable in the feudal hierarchy, and he does a lot of it through the point of view of the people most hurt by it. In addition to having POV characters that are illegitimate, poor, physically disabled and/or disfigured, etc., a full half of his major player/viewpoint characters are women. (Just like in real life!) These women run the entire moral spectrum, from scheming, selfish Cersei Lannister at the "evil" end to Brienne, who just wants to serve and be loyal and honorable and keep all her oaths, on the "good" end. (Danaerys is on a one-woman quest to end rape and slavery throughout the entire world, which you'd think would put her as Most Goodest Woman, but she's a lot more complicated than that. She has, uh, good intentions?) They also run the gamut of femininity--there are "tomboy" or "mannish" women, like Arya and Brienne, or the wildling women like Ygritte; there are hyperfeminine "good girls" like Sansa (who is a one-character study in why teaching girls femininity is crippling and bad for them); there is Cersei, the femme fatale (who apparently hates every minute of it and hugely resents that nearly every other form of attempting to bribe, buy off, coerce or manipulate men falls flat in the face of their desire to bang the Queen); there are a weird variety of "mother" characters--Catelyn, the mother who tries to raise her kids to be functional and independent adults; Cersei, the aggressively overprotective parent who also wants to use her kids to fulfill her own dreams (in this case, to be the boss of everyone); and Dany, the symbolic mother of monsters, misfits and social rejects. All of these noblewomen have their own ways of attempting to protect themselves and/or self-realize and/or gain power in a hyperpatriarchal society in which their main job is to be sold from family to family for political reasons and bear them heirs. Lower-class women, of course, do not get even the fake courtesies that pass for respecting upper-class women, and tend to hold actual jobs, including jobs that are not being a sex worker. (There are quite a number of sex workers, too, some of whom are fairly well-developed characters with backstories and things. And a very wide variety of views on their jobs.) Rape is a constant threat and if you are very, very privileged, you have maybe a fifty percent chance that some dude may have enough of a problem with that to ever protect you. Instead of one token warrior maid in the whole series, there is basically a token warrior maid in nearly every group of people: Arya in the Stark family, Brienne in Renly's host, Asha in the Iron Islands, Maege Mormont and the other women of Bear Island in the Northmen's host, even Chaella of the Black Ears in Tyrion's gang of hillman chiefs. Some of them are sexy warrior ladies; some of them are not.
6. Bloodlines and Destiny Are A Really Big Deal: There are only two ways in which it can be a big deal--when people make it a big deal, and when hereditary insanity runs in your family. Much of the fighting over who has the hereditary right to what thrones under which sets of rules of primogeniture shows up how utterly arbitrary it all is, particularly since most of these systems produce 'rightful" heirs that are a far cry from Aragorn. Dany is probably more or less the "rightful" heir to Westeros, if you dismiss Robert's entire rebellion as illegitimate (which you don't), but only because Viserys got his arse killed by an angry warlord. If you accept Robert's rebellion, the rightful king is Stannis, who nobody likes and who is in the thrall of some weird monotheistic fire worship religion. (We particularly dislike him in ADWD, since now he is all up Jon Snow's arse and we like Jon Snow.) There's a bizarre sort of "might makes right" sentiment in which more and more of the Seven Kingdoms will straight up say that bloodlines are less important for demanding submission as having a pet dragon.
7. My Enemy And My Other Enemy Are Totally Friends/Big Unified Conspiracy: Everybody in Westeros believes this, and they're usually wrong. As opposed to the popular storytelling convention of having lots of unrelated things all turn out to be part of the same enormous conspiracy, Westerosi characters tend to see conspiracies and united fronts among people who can't stand each other and can barely work together at knifepoint. The most hilarious example of this is when Brandon Tully, Catelyn's uncle, thinks that the Lannisters are behind Jon Snow's election to Lord Commander of the Night's Watch because the Tullys are fighting the Lannisters and also Brandon loves his niece, who never liked Jon. Meanwhile, the Lannisters are pitching a grand mal hissy fit that "Ned Stark's bastard!" got elected instead of the dude they'd actually sent to steal that election, and the reader is sitting around going "Wait wait, when did we establish that Brandon Tully is DUMBER THAN A ROCK?" And they do this all the time. And they are ALWAYS wrong. And there is always infighting and betrayal on their "side" too, but it never occurs to them that other factions might be having the same problem. Dany's the only one with any excuse, being two continents away and having learned all of her family history from Viserys, but it didn't stop me from snorting tea out my nose when she said "Stark, Lannister, what's the difference?" Dramatic irony and misinformation run so high in this series you're liable to choke on them.
8. There Is Totally A Big Difference Between Civilized Countries And Those Primitive Places That Still Have Slavery And Stuff: It's not that the slave cities don't suck, it's just that Westeros isn't really any less barbaric. Everyone's got their own idea about what makes those other people barbarians, but the least shitty culture is probably the wildlings. They hang out in the cold far north and periodically steal shit (and sometimes people) from the Westerosi, but they have a fairly democratic society and if a dude "steals" a woman and she doesn't want to be "stolen" it is entirely within her rights to kick his arse (or slit his throat) and leave, and the "spearwives" are usually perfectly equipped to do so. They're hardly "noble savage" types, though, and their freedom comes at a price--wildling life is extremely dangerous. Also: rebuilding an economy after you ban slavery is really hard.

This... really doesn't even begin to cover it, really. You could probably write a master's thesis on ASoIaF as metacriticism. Someday I hope to actually do so. A lot of fantasy work is "pseudo-medieval"; ASoIaF may be the first fantasy work I've ever read that I'd class as "semi-medieval" instead--technically, politically, and socioculturally, it's very heavily based on actual feudal Europe.

All the things we love about reading fantasy are still there though (except "epic battle between good and evil"; a lot of people specifically like that one; it has the clarity of childhood): epic battles, dragons, zombies, tantalizing bits of another world's history, young useless people rising up to become awesome, a fat sidekick who becomes awesome in his own right, regicide, plots to commit more regicide, a funny dwarf (although a very different kind of funny dwarf--in this case, it's a caustically witty human person with dwarfism), a long-lost exiled Rightful Monarch (sort of), some wargs, some quests, a lone few "true knights." If you're me and you grew up reading Tamora Pierce and stuff, the Lady Knight feels like a familiar fantasy staple. There is a young boy with Mysterious Parentage, and there is a big "bringing magic back to the land" story arc. Also, big scary but also adorable magical familiars.

This post may have been totally incoherent, but trying to review four thousands pages of a story made of spoilers without spoiling too much is just beyond my skill as a reviewer. You should probably just go read the books instead.