Last time on padding and horses, Ratcatcher found a tunnel.
Ch7 has another POV character, Unforgiven Blossom, a woman who’s working for the Prince of Shadow despite not being dead yet. With a name like Unforgiven Blossom, you knew she’d be doing something along those lines. One wonders what her parents were thinking.
She also still had her tongue in her head, which made her even rarer.
This is lazy. We just heard that Mr. Solely-to-blame-for-the-Ursurpation removes the tongues of his slaves. It’s like the author can’t think of what else to do to show someone has little regard for their servants. This is the underworld and these are the neverborn’s servants – a better statement would be to say that she had a physical body that hadn’t been torn apart for parts.
Unforgiven Blossom, like Sandheart, holds the highest rank a female character can – someone who’s quite competent and therefore trusted/valued by the guy in charge within her role. There’s one female monster later on that controls an area of her own, but that’s it. This isn’t direct sexism, and Unforgiven Blossom, like Sandheart, is shown to be extremely talented, but the inevitable result of it. The majority of characters in the book are male because men are normal and women are exceptions, which ends up producing situations like this. There’s plenty here to work with if you want to expand on their roles, but the story really isn’t about them.
This relates to the similar issue seen in fanfic – like much fanfic, this book is a mix of canon characters and OCs. If the canon cast is unbalanced, can you really blame the author for ending up with similar demographics? Are they obligated to make sure their OCs fix this discrepancy, or is it enough that there isn’t an imbalance among their own OCs? Like much fanfic, these questions are intriguing and yet largely academic, because the OCs end up about as unbalanced as the original canon set and the canon characters the author chooses to play with are going to be even more unbalanced than original canon.
It’s a very common pattern, you can see it play out a lot in comics. People are far more willing to make up their own version of a minority character type than continue someone else’s. The end result is that comics do by now have a number of homosexual characters (most of whom are dead), lots of women (the fridges overflow) and a reasonable spread of ethnic diversity (except for the fact they spend most of their time in canceled book limbo).
Back to Blossom. Continuing our parade of mortals, she’s one. She’s somehow the best diviner ever, so that she’s become the Prince’s sole diviner. And, of course, she’s doing this by reading the stars…
Above her, the orrery whirled and spun, stars and planets dancing by with alarming grace.
A fool might look at the device and wonder how it worked, as the five planets darted and swooped amongst a host of greater and lesser celestial bodies in imitation of the motions of the heavens. A knave might gaze at the prince’s engine of divination and wonder at the cost of its making, for the stars and planets were made from gems, and the orbits and epicycles upon which they moved were hammered from silver and gold.
This isn’t excusable the way not knowing about Sidereals is.
See, the reason for reading the stars every time you want to divine stuff is they don’t move in predictable paths. If they did, people wouldn’t need to keep rechecking. And Exalted isn’t a heliocentric universe, however much some recent developers may fanboy the Unconquered Sun.
Exalted is flat. If you go high enough, you can smack into the sky – in fact, one theory on the location of the yozi’s prison is that it’s behind that, so try not to hit it too hard. The sun actually travels across the sky. The stars represent living creatures, and move in accordance to their lives and destinies. There are no planets. The five Maidens are five stars, not the other planets in a nonexistent planetary system.
Or in short, nothing orbits around anything. The closest it gets is Gaia orbiting emotionally around Luna due to her being just that great.
While she’s working, the Prince appears to startle her for the lulz because evil doesn’t have anything better to do with his time, I guess.
He keeps ducking the spinning planets of her giant solar system model while she says that something big has happened.
a new comet manifested itself there, and scribed for itself a path uncomfortably close to the sun. It may be destroyed, or it may flare into prominence; the omens are uncertain as of yet.
A comet, in Exalted terms, is a chunk of starmetal falling to Creation. So what this means in game terms is that somehow a bunch of Sidereals have epically fucked up their attempt attempt to get more starmetal and may end up destroying the valuable chunk of dead god. Which admittedly would be a pretty major omen, since all the Sidereals should have interest in getting more starmetal so this suggests something’s gone really wrong if none of them managed to find the time to meddle the comet’s path to safety or none of them were capable of it.
Also, there’s a name in the stars. So there’s a person, place or thing that’s important, but she doesn’t know which. The Prince of Shadows just tells her to figure it out or he’ll have someone else try to by reading her guts. That’s appropriately brutal, Prince, but it’s rather cliched to be threatening valued workers with death every time there’s the slightest issue. This is why Evil ends up being staffed entirely by incompetents, you can’t expect people to do good work when they’re being replaced every week.
But she rushes off and finds out that Qut Toloc is a town, as we already know. So yes, this chapter was even more filler than the previous. The only new thing it introduces is that now Team True Evil knows the name, which isn’t going to matter.
This chapter shows off why ignoring Exalted’s setting sucks beyond the fact it’s not delivering on the original promise. The lack of forward motion for the plot would have been fine if it was serving the purpose of developing characters or detailing the setting. But this chapter tells us nothing we don’t already know – the Prince has some living people in his service (well of course, he has some in his entourage), the Prince values people who do their job well without annoying him (a repeat of what was said better with Sandheart), Qut Toloc is important, and finally, spends half its time on describing Creation as having the same star system as Earth.
We are, of course, never told why Unforgiven Blossom is so loyal a servant besides the fact her name made it inevitable she’d get involved in something grimdark. This could have been a great chance to establish why the hell people work for him, and do so in a much better way than lol pure evil. It could also have expanded on why living servants were rare besides the insanity of helping him – protecting mortals from death is one of the sins against the neverborn, even if they’re loyal to the cause of oblivion, and the underworld is a dangerous place. Plus mortals also need normal food shipped in or they’ll starve, and they can freeze or get sick or all sorts of other mortal things. You can’t just forget about them like you can ghosts.
And her divination would have been the perfect time to expand upon how stars in Exalted work. Besides giving an explanation of how the world is flat and the sky is too, as an Abyssal/deathlord servant, she should be interested in both Creation’s stars and the Underworld’s (and combining the two would explain why she’s getting a similar result to Shooshpap’s fluke while none of the regular divination being done in Creation finds anything) which would be a perfect point to jump into an explanation of how the Underworld differs from Creation besides being more deadish, as well as the fact it exists at all – thus far the book hasn’t gotten into that, which is a problem for a story that features the dead so heavily.