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some_stars) wrote2011-07-22 03:45 am
some_stars) wrote2011-07-22 03:45 am
betrayed by literature
Well, children's literature, but still. See, as part of this godawful unbearable week of depression, I've been feeling threatened by the internet (hence all those emails I need to write, aiiieeeeeeee). To deal with the ensuing boredom I tried reading actual books again, and I decided to catch up on all the Young Wizards books that have been published since I stopped paying attention, which would be everything after the fourth one. This seemed like an increasingly excellent decision until yesterday, and then much moreso an hour ago when I finished the ninth/currently last book and immediately wanted to throw it in the garbage--literally, I was reading in the kitchen and I had to take the garbage out and I wanted to just chuck it in there.
Before all this, I started with rereading the first four, and they were wonderful as I remembered. Then the fifth, and not far into this is where I'd stopped reading years ago, and there is a definite change in a lot of things at this point, but I kept reading this time and I really liked it. Could have done without yet MORE Christianity being wedged in there, but it was so present in the first three that I pretty much knew what I was in for. And other than that, it was great--different, it had lost some qualities, but gained other good ones.
Book six filled me with rage for the endless autism-fail and disability-fail in general, but I at least didn't feel like something already there was now being ruined, and there were also some really neat parts, and I liked seeing more of Kit, and an exploration of grief that was neither brand-new nor pathological. Book seven, fantastic, new characters that I adored, serious building on elements from earlier books that felt completely organic, a wonderful plot, just perfect. Book eight, also perfect--well, almost, I had a few qualms (one of which being, MORE CHRISTIANITY, fucking come on, it's like she's not even trying to think in any other shape anymore), but on the whole it was wonderful in the same ways--characters, plot, building on previous stuff--oh my god, the moment when Ponch said that everything is fine, my heart nearly burst with FEELINGS--everything felt natural and right.
And then I came to A Wizard of Mars and--I knew before I'd gotten too far in, maybe a quarter of the way, that something was wrong. And then it got worse, and then SO MUCH worse--the one really good, perfect thing was the way the aliens ended up not being fixed and happy forever and all essentially good and pure of heart. But the rest--let me attempt to unpack the whirling morass of enraged rejection that I am currently feeling.
1. It was so unbelievably gender-essentialist and heteronormative. Girls are crazy! Boys are stupid! WHAT THE FUCK. And the whole thing with the insane irrational domineering princess, who browbeats her weak but basically noble boyfriend, and it's not even her idea to do the browbeating, she was pushed to do it by another man, and her insanity/irrationality is entirely about her boyfriend, not about a horribly-perverted fear for her people or anything Serious like that. And the jealousy, and Aurilelde flinging catfight-worthy insults at Nita, and oh, Nita comes to like the way those not-clothes look on her--and how Khretef has to wait and wait for just the right male wizard to arrive, because somehow that really essentially matters. And it's another male wizard good with machines and a female not-wizard-but-still-magical who's a seer. Which is an intensely gendered concept, and it's not like I mind Nita being first good with living things and then having visions while Kit is mechanical, because they're only two people and it's just as limiting to force all your characters to be inverted stereotypes, plus, Dairine--but, you know, stuff's piling up. Not just this but together with all the rest. Oh, and the planetary for Earth is a literal Earth mother. Another thing that in isolation is completely fine but taken together--well, if the character had been male, somehow I doubt he'd have been written as having a baby attached to him at all times. It's like Dairine is the only person in this entire fictional world who gets to have a recognizably humanoid gender but escape gender stereotypes--which makes the otherwise-enchanting hint in book 9 that she might be a secret alien so much less enchanting.
2. The heteronormativity--it's 2010 and writing in YA is no longer an excuse to banish queerness entirely from your fictional universe. In the eighties, yeah, having a kids' story with a couple secondary characters strongly coded queer and a M/F set of main characters who weren't romantically involved was pretty fantastic; I certainly appreciated it in the early nineties though I didn't quite know at the time what I was appreciating. And it's not that I feel betrayed by Nita and Kit both being apparently straight--I mean, yeah, I do a small amount, but the RL odds are against it and characters are who they are in your head, once you've established them, and also it's not quite that far in the future yet where changing the sexuality of a main character--or appearing to change it, in the eyes of people who don't understand (bi)sexuality and are easily threatened--is not a piece of cake necessarily.
It's not that they're into the opposite gender, because I would happily read about their hetero romances, did happily read about such in book 4. It's that, up until this book, when someone in these stories said "you know, girls and boys can be best friends without being a couple," they meant it, and the story meant it. Now the story says it and obviously thinks it's a lie. I loved the relationship between them of best friends, closer than close, and not boyfriend and girlfriend. I liked the concept in the mythology that wizarding partners are less likely to get together romantically for extremely sensible reasons, and I liked the way this story-universe really seemed to value friendship as every bit as important as other kinds of relationships. I loved that it wasn't one of those claustrophobic stories where people meet as kids and then are destined to fall in love and no outsiders can ever compete and ugh ugh ugh. I want outsiders! I love the outsiders! The new/fleshed-out secondary characters are my favorite thing about the latter six books! But no, YA rules are YA rules, apparently. I could have really adored the bit where Nita says that life without Kit doesn't seem worth living, because I love the idea of wizarding partnerships being that intense and deep--but at the end of this story, it just felt so gross. Would it have felt less gross if Kit was also a girl? Definitely--but not if we were 75 years in the future when there have been a whole bunch of annoyingly claustrophobic sex-obsessed YA series published featuring F/F couples. (That's probably an optimistically low number of years.) And even reading today, it would have felt a little uncomfortable after the previous 8 books establishing things as NOT THAT WAY and instead far more interesting.
And you know, yeah, it is a bit about them both turning out apparently straight, but that's mostly because there's no one else--all the humanoids have two genders that are just like human ones, and none of them are queer. It's not something you have to build a story around, you could just drop it in there, mostly unremarked-upon, like for instance if Roshaun came from somewhere with more than two genders, or had same-sex parents, or his dad in book 9 (or maybe even, god forbid, his mom) mentioned his now-canceled betrothal to a guy, or if in the discussion of the age of various species' pair-bonding he'd shown brief surprise at the prevalence of heterosexuality on Earth or assumed that Dairine was going to date girls. It could just be one line, you know?
Or, hell, go ahead and remark on it, that wouldn't be so unimaginable. Have Kit be the semi-reincarnation of and then absorbed by a girl rather than a boy, because the wizardry doesn't notice or care about that kind of thing, and he has to deal with his own issues about it. Or have the Shamask-Eilith have more than two genders that aren't direct copies of Earth genders, cultural baggage and all. Or have everything the same but Aurilelde is a guy. Or ANYTHING. At any point, in any book, just--SOME sign that you don't have to lay eggs or be a centipede to have a gender and/or sexuality that's not Earth-standard heterosexual, version late 20th century America. Oh, and maybe let Tom and Carl come out of the damn closet, because coded queer no longer counts, in fact these days it reads as homophobic tbqh. (Do they have to be married to live together? Of course not. They have to be married to make all the coy winking in the first three books not enraging.)
(Some other possibilities, including-but-not-limited-to, and I'll even stick with only the books published after 2000: Helena comes back from college with an ex-girlfriend instead, remains accepting-but-in-denial of the whole wizardry thing with a slightly different tinge. The Alaalu host family has two moms or dads, or more than two people, and/or Quelt flirts with Nita, which I sort of thought might be happening anyway tbh. Irina is exactly the same but a man--not about queerness, that, but would have soothed at least one raw burnt-out spot in my soul. Or, Irina is exactly the same but mentions having a girlfriend/wife. Filif or Sker'ret don't default to male pronouns for no fucking reason (also not really about queerness, or about humanoids, but see above re the open wound in my heart into which these books keep jamming lit cigarettes). Darryl has two moms/dads. Two of the briefly-appearing young human characters in book 8 are a pair of girlfriends or boyfriends. Pralaya the fucking space otter doesn't get his "realness" verified by the fact that he has a mate and kids. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here but this is how overwhelmingly heteronormative these books have become--that any of these things would mean so much.
On the non-tidal-wave-of-heterosexuality front, I'm not ruling Roshaun out completely yet, since he's clearly not dead and also was explicitly not interested in Dairine that way, at least the last time it seemed to come up, and also the age difference is just--well, I'm looking heavily sideways at people who ship them, and I'm even pretending she's thirteen by the time they meet. It's still way too big, and shipping them is such a cheap and lazy way to approach their fascinating relationship. It's a way that the story itself calls cheap and lazy, in fact, when the two of them talk about what other people think of them--but then, the story used to seem to view Kit and Nita that way too, and look how that turned out. I was just really hoping, still am a bit, for their relationship to be a refutation of this awful partnership=romance idea. I hope they'll stay just that intense and need each other just that much and it won't have to be the slightest bit sexual. I was really enjoying watching their sudden partnership appear and develop, hopefully that at least will survive.
I just--I hate the way the books have been steadily, increasingly larded with HETERO HETERO HETERO BOYS GIRLS SEX HETERO HETERO. Of course sex will come up, it should come up! I'd be disappointed if it didn't. But it would have been so refreshing and non-betraying if it had come up in a way that seemed to involve any actual thought whatsoever. Well, there's still plenty of time for Dairine to start dating ladies, and actually I wouldn't be much surprised if Carmela showed up with an alien girlfriend. Actually now I desperately want that.
3. Speaking of Dairine's age--the timeline sloppiness is just embarrassing. I'm fine with each book being set in its year of publication; it creates some weirdnesses but so would publishing a YA novel in 2010 that was set in the mid-eighties. What I'm not fine with is refusing to age the characters or allow time to pass in any remotely logical way, because there doesn't seem to be any REASON for it. Even if you go only by the in-book cues of time passing--ie, ignoring stated ages and characters talking/thinking about how many months or years ago things were, and only paying attention to seasons and school years--it gets super fucking ridiculous, with books 5-9 all taking place in less than nine months. And all those things you have to ignore because they make NO FUCKING SENSE, and they don't add to the story--in fact they subtract from it, because running across multiple references to Dairine being eleven in book 9 made large parts of the last two books nonsensical before I decided to just flat-out ignore it. And it makes Kit and Nita ridiculous novices considering all their knowledge, and it's just--STUPID. It's so fucking stupid for no goddamned reason at all. The timeline more than anything else has made me lose almost all respect for Diane Duane, who apparently doesn't give a shit about this story anymore.
(My current fanon timeline with ages, per book, because you totally care:
book 1: mid-school year, Nita 13 and Kit 12 and both in 7th grade, Dairine 10
book 2: summer after their 7th grade, 13 and 12, Dairine 11
book 3: their 8th grade, Nita 13/14 and Kit 12/13, Dairine 11
book 4: summer, Nita 14, Kit 13, Dairine 12, and Ronan 16.
book 5: this is where everything starts to go batshit and I get to making stuff up. Nita is almost but not yet 15, Kit is 14, they're both in 9th grade Dairine is 12. I can't remember when Carmela starts to show up more, but I'm imagining her almost a year older than Nita, one year up in school.
book 6: Nita 15, Kit 14, Dairine 12, takes place 5-6 weeks after the end of book 5. And Darryl of course is 11. Okay so far, but...
book 7: This should NOT be happening in the same damn school year, except it should--or rather, this book should be happening in the same school year, for the most part, but book 8 SHOULDN'T because it's just too much too fast. But I can't figure out where to split things to reinterpret them. I'll probably end up pushing this forward to the summer after 9th grade, but then of course there's the whole thing in book 8 about missing school--I'm just going to use quantum brain on it and not worry about details. Anyway, NOT having done any of that yet, this takes place during 9th grade, they're 15 14 and (barely) 13, a few months after book 6.
book 8: in theory, of course, everything's the same as above. Oh, and Ronan's 17 now. But not an old 17. I imagine his birthday in late winter, for absolutely no reason aside from my own enjoyment.
book 9: don't know what the fuck to do with this in my fanon, since it can't happen during a school year really. Winter vacation maybe? Anyway, in canon as has been modified to be less insane, it's the summer after 9th grade, and we're still at 15 14 13. Ronan's still 17, Darryl's still 11, Carmela's 16.
I want to rewrite things in my head so that in book 9 or thereabouts, Nita's 16, Kit is 15, and Dairine is almost 14. It just feels weird and wrong for them not to age over the course of so many events. Also, and not really related to the timeline, I want Nita and Carmela to date, like in canon, I think it would be amazing. I also, not in canon (unless she suddenly decides to let them age and also writes like ten more books), want 7+-years-in-the-future Darryl/Ronan, since that was one of the few beautiful perfect parts of book 9. They should do stand-up. And then, (very) eventually, date. Oh, and I want Kit/Ronan fic just to satisfy my own gratuitous proclivities. It wouldn't be totally out of nowhere--there were some faint-but-plausible moments to run with in book 8, before the hetero-hammer came down--but it's not really something you can reasonably ship. I just really want Kit slash because, you know, I'm me, and there's not a lot of options.)
4. The plot was pretty much a letdown, conclusion aside as mentioned above. None of the Shamask-Eilith characters were interesting or at all developed, and various plot elements were tossed in really haphazardly and barely integrated. So many things seemed to be dropped until the very end and then hastily tied off, and I just wasn't surprised by, or even moved by, anything.
Also, I get the supposed point of having Nita fight the final battle--the theme that's been building of people fighting/dying for her, of Kit coming to fight for her in book 5, the more general theme of the final battles in these books being team efforts, where sometimes someone saves you--sometimes you don't do anything at all, and the whole point is that that's what you need to be (not) doing at that moment--but dramatically it felt weird, because Nita had had a whole emotional arc about feeling like she needed to do everything herself, alone, of rejecting help and wanting to be seen as independent. I don't remember if prior to this book Kit had any moments like that, but if he did they were certainly never emphasized, and within this book they seemed to clearly be coming from an outside force. So having him mostly offstage for the climax felt very unsatisfying, narratively. It was even more unsatisfying because he got what was clearly supposed to be the emotional climax, but everything in it was so stale and shallow that it felt pretty empty, and it didn't seem to have anything to do with him specifically. A whole lot of this book didn't seem to have that much to do with Kit specifically, actually. I mean, not all of it, there were some great parts during the setup, but...I still don't feel like I know him as well as Nita, and that shouldn't be happening.
And really, basically, I just could not give a fuck about the Shamask-Eilith, or rather I got a bit interested in their situation but not at all in any of the people or their culture, and that is terrible. To sum up: grotesquely gender- and heteronormative; lazy boring writing. A horrible end to what had been mostly the bright point of my shittiest week.
(I say 'mostly' because book six what is your fucking problem, I might still put that one through the shredder despite feeling overall much more positive about it than I do about about book nine, in that it's a good book saturated in fail, not a crappy book that also fails. Although come to think of it, it's another instance of Kit getting a major chunk of plot that nonetheless fails to reflect or enable any character development the way Nita and Dairine's plots do. Better than the other way around for sure--I'm more than happy to continue having Nita as the more main of the main characters and the central touchstone character--but still, come on, just write him the way you write the girls, it can't be THAT hard.)
Before all this, I started with rereading the first four, and they were wonderful as I remembered. Then the fifth, and not far into this is where I'd stopped reading years ago, and there is a definite change in a lot of things at this point, but I kept reading this time and I really liked it. Could have done without yet MORE Christianity being wedged in there, but it was so present in the first three that I pretty much knew what I was in for. And other than that, it was great--different, it had lost some qualities, but gained other good ones.
Book six filled me with rage for the endless autism-fail and disability-fail in general, but I at least didn't feel like something already there was now being ruined, and there were also some really neat parts, and I liked seeing more of Kit, and an exploration of grief that was neither brand-new nor pathological. Book seven, fantastic, new characters that I adored, serious building on elements from earlier books that felt completely organic, a wonderful plot, just perfect. Book eight, also perfect--well, almost, I had a few qualms (one of which being, MORE CHRISTIANITY, fucking come on, it's like she's not even trying to think in any other shape anymore), but on the whole it was wonderful in the same ways--characters, plot, building on previous stuff--oh my god, the moment when Ponch said that everything is fine, my heart nearly burst with FEELINGS--everything felt natural and right.
And then I came to A Wizard of Mars and--I knew before I'd gotten too far in, maybe a quarter of the way, that something was wrong. And then it got worse, and then SO MUCH worse--the one really good, perfect thing was the way the aliens ended up not being fixed and happy forever and all essentially good and pure of heart. But the rest--let me attempt to unpack the whirling morass of enraged rejection that I am currently feeling.
1. It was so unbelievably gender-essentialist and heteronormative. Girls are crazy! Boys are stupid! WHAT THE FUCK. And the whole thing with the insane irrational domineering princess, who browbeats her weak but basically noble boyfriend, and it's not even her idea to do the browbeating, she was pushed to do it by another man, and her insanity/irrationality is entirely about her boyfriend, not about a horribly-perverted fear for her people or anything Serious like that. And the jealousy, and Aurilelde flinging catfight-worthy insults at Nita, and oh, Nita comes to like the way those not-clothes look on her--and how Khretef has to wait and wait for just the right male wizard to arrive, because somehow that really essentially matters. And it's another male wizard good with machines and a female not-wizard-but-still-magical who's a seer. Which is an intensely gendered concept, and it's not like I mind Nita being first good with living things and then having visions while Kit is mechanical, because they're only two people and it's just as limiting to force all your characters to be inverted stereotypes, plus, Dairine--but, you know, stuff's piling up. Not just this but together with all the rest. Oh, and the planetary for Earth is a literal Earth mother. Another thing that in isolation is completely fine but taken together--well, if the character had been male, somehow I doubt he'd have been written as having a baby attached to him at all times. It's like Dairine is the only person in this entire fictional world who gets to have a recognizably humanoid gender but escape gender stereotypes--which makes the otherwise-enchanting hint in book 9 that she might be a secret alien so much less enchanting.
2. The heteronormativity--it's 2010 and writing in YA is no longer an excuse to banish queerness entirely from your fictional universe. In the eighties, yeah, having a kids' story with a couple secondary characters strongly coded queer and a M/F set of main characters who weren't romantically involved was pretty fantastic; I certainly appreciated it in the early nineties though I didn't quite know at the time what I was appreciating. And it's not that I feel betrayed by Nita and Kit both being apparently straight--I mean, yeah, I do a small amount, but the RL odds are against it and characters are who they are in your head, once you've established them, and also it's not quite that far in the future yet where changing the sexuality of a main character--or appearing to change it, in the eyes of people who don't understand (bi)sexuality and are easily threatened--is not a piece of cake necessarily.
It's not that they're into the opposite gender, because I would happily read about their hetero romances, did happily read about such in book 4. It's that, up until this book, when someone in these stories said "you know, girls and boys can be best friends without being a couple," they meant it, and the story meant it. Now the story says it and obviously thinks it's a lie. I loved the relationship between them of best friends, closer than close, and not boyfriend and girlfriend. I liked the concept in the mythology that wizarding partners are less likely to get together romantically for extremely sensible reasons, and I liked the way this story-universe really seemed to value friendship as every bit as important as other kinds of relationships. I loved that it wasn't one of those claustrophobic stories where people meet as kids and then are destined to fall in love and no outsiders can ever compete and ugh ugh ugh. I want outsiders! I love the outsiders! The new/fleshed-out secondary characters are my favorite thing about the latter six books! But no, YA rules are YA rules, apparently. I could have really adored the bit where Nita says that life without Kit doesn't seem worth living, because I love the idea of wizarding partnerships being that intense and deep--but at the end of this story, it just felt so gross. Would it have felt less gross if Kit was also a girl? Definitely--but not if we were 75 years in the future when there have been a whole bunch of annoyingly claustrophobic sex-obsessed YA series published featuring F/F couples. (That's probably an optimistically low number of years.) And even reading today, it would have felt a little uncomfortable after the previous 8 books establishing things as NOT THAT WAY and instead far more interesting.
And you know, yeah, it is a bit about them both turning out apparently straight, but that's mostly because there's no one else--all the humanoids have two genders that are just like human ones, and none of them are queer. It's not something you have to build a story around, you could just drop it in there, mostly unremarked-upon, like for instance if Roshaun came from somewhere with more than two genders, or had same-sex parents, or his dad in book 9 (or maybe even, god forbid, his mom) mentioned his now-canceled betrothal to a guy, or if in the discussion of the age of various species' pair-bonding he'd shown brief surprise at the prevalence of heterosexuality on Earth or assumed that Dairine was going to date girls. It could just be one line, you know?
Or, hell, go ahead and remark on it, that wouldn't be so unimaginable. Have Kit be the semi-reincarnation of and then absorbed by a girl rather than a boy, because the wizardry doesn't notice or care about that kind of thing, and he has to deal with his own issues about it. Or have the Shamask-Eilith have more than two genders that aren't direct copies of Earth genders, cultural baggage and all. Or have everything the same but Aurilelde is a guy. Or ANYTHING. At any point, in any book, just--SOME sign that you don't have to lay eggs or be a centipede to have a gender and/or sexuality that's not Earth-standard heterosexual, version late 20th century America. Oh, and maybe let Tom and Carl come out of the damn closet, because coded queer no longer counts, in fact these days it reads as homophobic tbqh. (Do they have to be married to live together? Of course not. They have to be married to make all the coy winking in the first three books not enraging.)
(Some other possibilities, including-but-not-limited-to, and I'll even stick with only the books published after 2000: Helena comes back from college with an ex-girlfriend instead, remains accepting-but-in-denial of the whole wizardry thing with a slightly different tinge. The Alaalu host family has two moms or dads, or more than two people, and/or Quelt flirts with Nita, which I sort of thought might be happening anyway tbh. Irina is exactly the same but a man--not about queerness, that, but would have soothed at least one raw burnt-out spot in my soul. Or, Irina is exactly the same but mentions having a girlfriend/wife. Filif or Sker'ret don't default to male pronouns for no fucking reason (also not really about queerness, or about humanoids, but see above re the open wound in my heart into which these books keep jamming lit cigarettes). Darryl has two moms/dads. Two of the briefly-appearing young human characters in book 8 are a pair of girlfriends or boyfriends. Pralaya the fucking space otter doesn't get his "realness" verified by the fact that he has a mate and kids. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here but this is how overwhelmingly heteronormative these books have become--that any of these things would mean so much.
On the non-tidal-wave-of-heterosexuality front, I'm not ruling Roshaun out completely yet, since he's clearly not dead and also was explicitly not interested in Dairine that way, at least the last time it seemed to come up, and also the age difference is just--well, I'm looking heavily sideways at people who ship them, and I'm even pretending she's thirteen by the time they meet. It's still way too big, and shipping them is such a cheap and lazy way to approach their fascinating relationship. It's a way that the story itself calls cheap and lazy, in fact, when the two of them talk about what other people think of them--but then, the story used to seem to view Kit and Nita that way too, and look how that turned out. I was just really hoping, still am a bit, for their relationship to be a refutation of this awful partnership=romance idea. I hope they'll stay just that intense and need each other just that much and it won't have to be the slightest bit sexual. I was really enjoying watching their sudden partnership appear and develop, hopefully that at least will survive.
I just--I hate the way the books have been steadily, increasingly larded with HETERO HETERO HETERO BOYS GIRLS SEX HETERO HETERO. Of course sex will come up, it should come up! I'd be disappointed if it didn't. But it would have been so refreshing and non-betraying if it had come up in a way that seemed to involve any actual thought whatsoever. Well, there's still plenty of time for Dairine to start dating ladies, and actually I wouldn't be much surprised if Carmela showed up with an alien girlfriend. Actually now I desperately want that.
3. Speaking of Dairine's age--the timeline sloppiness is just embarrassing. I'm fine with each book being set in its year of publication; it creates some weirdnesses but so would publishing a YA novel in 2010 that was set in the mid-eighties. What I'm not fine with is refusing to age the characters or allow time to pass in any remotely logical way, because there doesn't seem to be any REASON for it. Even if you go only by the in-book cues of time passing--ie, ignoring stated ages and characters talking/thinking about how many months or years ago things were, and only paying attention to seasons and school years--it gets super fucking ridiculous, with books 5-9 all taking place in less than nine months. And all those things you have to ignore because they make NO FUCKING SENSE, and they don't add to the story--in fact they subtract from it, because running across multiple references to Dairine being eleven in book 9 made large parts of the last two books nonsensical before I decided to just flat-out ignore it. And it makes Kit and Nita ridiculous novices considering all their knowledge, and it's just--STUPID. It's so fucking stupid for no goddamned reason at all. The timeline more than anything else has made me lose almost all respect for Diane Duane, who apparently doesn't give a shit about this story anymore.
(My current fanon timeline with ages, per book, because you totally care:
book 1: mid-school year, Nita 13 and Kit 12 and both in 7th grade, Dairine 10
book 2: summer after their 7th grade, 13 and 12, Dairine 11
book 3: their 8th grade, Nita 13/14 and Kit 12/13, Dairine 11
book 4: summer, Nita 14, Kit 13, Dairine 12, and Ronan 16.
book 5: this is where everything starts to go batshit and I get to making stuff up. Nita is almost but not yet 15, Kit is 14, they're both in 9th grade Dairine is 12. I can't remember when Carmela starts to show up more, but I'm imagining her almost a year older than Nita, one year up in school.
book 6: Nita 15, Kit 14, Dairine 12, takes place 5-6 weeks after the end of book 5. And Darryl of course is 11. Okay so far, but...
book 7: This should NOT be happening in the same damn school year, except it should--or rather, this book should be happening in the same school year, for the most part, but book 8 SHOULDN'T because it's just too much too fast. But I can't figure out where to split things to reinterpret them. I'll probably end up pushing this forward to the summer after 9th grade, but then of course there's the whole thing in book 8 about missing school--I'm just going to use quantum brain on it and not worry about details. Anyway, NOT having done any of that yet, this takes place during 9th grade, they're 15 14 and (barely) 13, a few months after book 6.
book 8: in theory, of course, everything's the same as above. Oh, and Ronan's 17 now. But not an old 17. I imagine his birthday in late winter, for absolutely no reason aside from my own enjoyment.
book 9: don't know what the fuck to do with this in my fanon, since it can't happen during a school year really. Winter vacation maybe? Anyway, in canon as has been modified to be less insane, it's the summer after 9th grade, and we're still at 15 14 13. Ronan's still 17, Darryl's still 11, Carmela's 16.
I want to rewrite things in my head so that in book 9 or thereabouts, Nita's 16, Kit is 15, and Dairine is almost 14. It just feels weird and wrong for them not to age over the course of so many events. Also, and not really related to the timeline, I want Nita and Carmela to date, like in canon, I think it would be amazing. I also, not in canon (unless she suddenly decides to let them age and also writes like ten more books), want 7+-years-in-the-future Darryl/Ronan, since that was one of the few beautiful perfect parts of book 9. They should do stand-up. And then, (very) eventually, date. Oh, and I want Kit/Ronan fic just to satisfy my own gratuitous proclivities. It wouldn't be totally out of nowhere--there were some faint-but-plausible moments to run with in book 8, before the hetero-hammer came down--but it's not really something you can reasonably ship. I just really want Kit slash because, you know, I'm me, and there's not a lot of options.)
4. The plot was pretty much a letdown, conclusion aside as mentioned above. None of the Shamask-Eilith characters were interesting or at all developed, and various plot elements were tossed in really haphazardly and barely integrated. So many things seemed to be dropped until the very end and then hastily tied off, and I just wasn't surprised by, or even moved by, anything.
Also, I get the supposed point of having Nita fight the final battle--the theme that's been building of people fighting/dying for her, of Kit coming to fight for her in book 5, the more general theme of the final battles in these books being team efforts, where sometimes someone saves you--sometimes you don't do anything at all, and the whole point is that that's what you need to be (not) doing at that moment--but dramatically it felt weird, because Nita had had a whole emotional arc about feeling like she needed to do everything herself, alone, of rejecting help and wanting to be seen as independent. I don't remember if prior to this book Kit had any moments like that, but if he did they were certainly never emphasized, and within this book they seemed to clearly be coming from an outside force. So having him mostly offstage for the climax felt very unsatisfying, narratively. It was even more unsatisfying because he got what was clearly supposed to be the emotional climax, but everything in it was so stale and shallow that it felt pretty empty, and it didn't seem to have anything to do with him specifically. A whole lot of this book didn't seem to have that much to do with Kit specifically, actually. I mean, not all of it, there were some great parts during the setup, but...I still don't feel like I know him as well as Nita, and that shouldn't be happening.
And really, basically, I just could not give a fuck about the Shamask-Eilith, or rather I got a bit interested in their situation but not at all in any of the people or their culture, and that is terrible. To sum up: grotesquely gender- and heteronormative; lazy boring writing. A horrible end to what had been mostly the bright point of my shittiest week.
(I say 'mostly' because book six what is your fucking problem, I might still put that one through the shredder despite feeling overall much more positive about it than I do about about book nine, in that it's a good book saturated in fail, not a crappy book that also fails. Although come to think of it, it's another instance of Kit getting a major chunk of plot that nonetheless fails to reflect or enable any character development the way Nita and Dairine's plots do. Better than the other way around for sure--I'm more than happy to continue having Nita as the more main of the main characters and the central touchstone character--but still, come on, just write him the way you write the girls, it can't be THAT hard.)
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I stopped reading one book later than you did, even though book four actually pissed me off a lot because it seemed like such a step backward - Nita's parents had accepted her wizardry, but suddenly they're sending her away for a holiday from wizardry.
I'm really disappointed to hear how much fail the recent books are. I'm not surprised by the gender essentialism - I've read her Tale of the Five books - but I am surprised by just how much encroaching Christianity (Tale of the Five was way pagan) and her lack of creative aliens (creative aliens were the high point of her Star Trek tie-ins.)
Although, while we're complaining about Diane Duane, have you read the second Tale of the Five book, The Door into Shadow? Spoilers and child rape triggers follow.
So, in order to claim her magic powers, Segnbora has to get past a block from her past. This is that she was raped by the gardener when she was about five, just after she'd learned to masturbate - in fact, he finds her masturbating under a hedge. The rape is very graphically described, and involves all the major orifices. So, Segnbora remembers this again, comes to terms with it, spirit-travels to the border between life and death, where she finds her rapist waiting for her, unable to cross over because she's been keeping him there. She realises that the rape was necessary to make her the person she is today, forgives him, tells him to go in peace, and calls him her 'rapist' in scare quotes to underline that it's really nothing.
So yeah, if I hadn't read The Door into Sunset (the third book) first, I might not have kept reading.
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Book four made sense to me, because acceptance isn't a single step or a one-way process, and even at the times when it is there's a ways between toleration and acceptance and support. So it seemed pretty natural/realistic to me the way her parents were acting there.
I don't know if the Christianity would be hitting other people over the head, although it's increased steadily. It started at the very beginning of the series, though, and it's mostly low-level, just...all the time. Basically it feels more and more like, for all the surface appearance of drawing from lots of different mythologies, the book's mythology is basically Biblical, mostly Christian, with a spin and a paint job and a handful of non-Christian accessories.
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I have heard elsewhere that Duane based Tom and Carl on two guys she knows who identify as straight, and therefore it'd be kind of RPF-y for her to have them be as gay and married as they come across to me. That doesn't change my reading, but it makes me slightly more sympathetic with the lack of followthrough.
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I'm pretty sure the Tom and Carl thing would matter less to me if anything else had appeared to take their place, preferably actual rather than crypto-queer this time. Because yeah, of course they could have that relationship and not be a couple, but it mattered a lot to me when I was little, and it's a huge disappointment that it didn't change along with my changing expectations of queerness in media. And it feels pretty shitty that the "they're not together, they're FRIENDS, why don't you believe in friendship, why does everything have to be about sex" couple who actually ARE that way and not apparently, retroactively, in denial are the queer pairing, while the hetero pairing is in fact together and about sex. Apparently.
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I want more counterexamples! she said, and went back to writing her present YA project.
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