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Self-indulgence
I was going to write Gregor/Laisa for the ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
asexual_fandom kink meme in honor of the day, but then I got distracted putting up bookshelves.
(I live in a 10'X12' room that contains a twin bunkbed, a dresser, one window, a very small closet, and 172 feet of bookshelf. Most of which is at minimum double-shelved. And I have another 10 feet to go up as soon as I either figure out another way to find the studs or give up and put in molly bolts.
182 feet of shelving - the equivalent of 11 floor-to-ceiling bookcases - might seem like a lot, but according to LibraryThing, I actually need about 240 feet. Um. Yep, that sounds about right.
...I could theoretically get that much shelving in here if I had bookshelves floor-to-ceiling on all the walls but then there would be no place for a, y'know, bed. It may yet get to that point.)
And since the Mad Hattery blog is still down (I'm only in it for the hats, folks) instead I shall do thefannish5, which is "Name your five favorite Royals from fiction", and I have altered it to "five favorite canon royal pairings from not-as-popular as they should be SF novels."
Since some of you seem to actually like it when I talk about my favorite old SF novels.
1. Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Jennifer Alayne, from A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson.
I can't remember whether I read A Midsummer Tempest before or after I read The Number of the Beast, but one or the other of them was my introduction to the fact that pro writers will totally write rampant, cracked-out crossover fanfic and call it pro-fic the minute they're popular enough to get away with it.
A Midsummer Tempest is steampunk AU RPF of the English Civil War crossed over with Shakespeare's comedies, plus the main characters randomly visit the Inn Between the Worlds halfway through and have drinks with characters from some of Anderson's other novels.
The main character is Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a historical figure whose actual RL biography can be best described as "epic" and who is one of those historical characters who is just better than you, at everything. However, this novel is set in a world where all of Shakespeare's plays are literally true, which means among other things that technology is several hundred years ahead in this timeline. Anyway Rupert gets captured and held by a Puritan gentleman who is obsessed by the new steam trains and has a beautiful ward named Jennifer who Rupert sort of cynically seduces in hopes of escaping, but when they do escape they fall into the hands of the fairy courts, whereupon Oberon and Titania Make Them Get Married and send them out to retrieve Prospero's books of magic in order to defend the last vestiges of the Old Ways from the Puritans.
...and then it gets crackier. Eventually there's a diving bell.
I like it because of the crack, because it is Renaissance steampunk before steampunk knew what it was, and because Rupert and Jennifer are just great characters - they are incredibly flawed as people in a lot of different ways but they do what needs to be done and have frequent Moments of Awesome and their relationship is possibly the most cynically unromantic and broken that two such fundamentally un-cynical and romantic and competent people could manage.
2. Amy and Perry from The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye
Princess Amethyst of Ambergeldar was given the gift of ordinariness by her fairy godmother, Crustacea, and among other results nobody can quite manage to ever call her anything but Amy. She manages (through gifts from other fairy godmothers like patience and compassion) to be happily ordinary among all of her beautiful and accomplished sisters, until her royal mother finally decides something must be done and betrothes her sight unseen to the supposedly very handsome and very proper young King of a neighboring kingdom.
So Amy runs away. She lives merrily for about a year alone in the forest (which was of course my favorite part of the book) but eventually needs new warm clothes that she can't make herself, so she wanders to the castle of her supposed betrothed and willingly gets a job as an assistant kitchen maid, counting the days until she has enough money to buy her dress and run back to her shack in the forest. She sort of accidentally makes friends with a young courtier called Perry when they're both sneaking to the kitchens after hours, and they bond, until of course in the end it turns out that Perry is (would it even be a spoiler to tell you this?)
This was my absolute favorite book the year after I outgrew Heidi and it still has the power to make me very happy. It is my favorite princess book ever; nothing particularly dramatic happens but it does what it does perfectly and Amy and Perry are both wonderful while being far more ordinary than heroic.
3. Fred Fritz and Anthony Villiers from The Thurb Revolution by Alexei Panshin
This is that SF of Manners I requested for Yuletide in 2009. Okay, technically Fred/Anthony isn't the canon pairing, but c'mon, IT ISN'T EVEN SUBTEXT. And I do like the person Fred eventually more-or-less ends up with, but the gender issues around said person are too confusing and problematic for me to go into detail here (plus spoilers!)
I actually strongly suspect Fred and/or Anthony of being pretty much asexual aromantic, and their relationships with their respective equally noble and equally unconventional spouses ... get very little play in the books, but I really wish they got more.
4. Prince Heir Josquin of Landuc and Prince Dewar from A Sorcerer and a Gentleman and sequels by Elizabeth Willey
Josquin/Dewar, on the other hand, is canon, though it doesn't get nearly enough attention in the books either. This is the series I have been know to describe as "Chronicles of Amber if it had been written by a slash writer" - I have no idea if Willey ever wrote fic, but this series takes the basic set-up of Chronicles of Amber, concentrates a lot more on the relationships and politics among the royals, makes half the characters bi or gay, and throws in everything from soulbonds to huddling for warmth.
Jos is actually my favorite character in the books. He's the heir to the guy who starts out as King of Everything, which must be an uncomfortable position, especially when the King is functionally immortal, your only role is to be married off for political purposes, and you're about a 6 on the Kinsey scale. Jos survives by refusing to take anything more seriously than it needs to be (and noticing the things that should be taken seriously, sometimes when everyone else is too busy with angst to notice.) He doesn't get nearly as much airtime as he should, and his thing with Dewar mosty cools down once they find out they're first cousins and politics gets involved, but the series opens with Dewar sneaking out of the Prince's bedchamber the morning after and fleeing the city before the King finds out what else he has despoiled, which was basically the point at which I decided I was going to like the series. :D
5. Morgon, Prince of Hed, and Raederle of An from the Riddle of Stars series by Patricia McKillip.
Raederle's hand was promised by her father, the King of An, to anyone who won a legendary Riddle-Game with a ghost. Raederle's childhood friend, Morgon, won the riddle-game - but didn't know that Raederle was part of the prize. He didn't even tell anybody he'd won, because he only played to see if he could, which left Raederle in something of a pickle when the ghost started telling people the game had already been won.
When Morgon finds out, he sets out for An to give Raederle back her choices, but he gets a bit sidetracked on the way, and in fact the whole trilogy could kind of be summarized as "How Morgon of Hed did not marry Raederle of An." By the time they finally meet up again they've both kind of outgrown silly things like betrothals, marriage, princes and true love, but the relationship between the two of them, unconventional as it is, is always the axis on which their world spins.
Relationships that didn't make the cut:
Prince Herewiss of the Brightwood & Prince Freelorn of Arlen & Segnbora & Queen Eftgan of Darthen & Royal Consort Wyn & Hasai & Sunspark - because I just talked about the Middle Kingdoms and how awesome they are; also Dairine & Roshaun from Young Wizards and the Empress of the Rihannsu & J'm Kirk - because I need to talk about authors other than Diane Duane sometimes
Emperor Gregor Vorbarra and Dr. Laisa Toscane - not obscure enough.
King Mendanbar and Queen Cimorene of the Enchanted Forest books (also King Tokoz and Queen Oraun of the Dragons) - because Patricia C. Wrede is still a little bit spoilt for me. :/
Nerilka and Alessan, Lady and Lord Holder of Ruatha - because Pern.
Hynkkel and Allitta of the Five Queendoms from Mark of the Cat by Andre Norton - because I still haven't got my hands on the second book and I don't know if Hynkkel actually manages to make an emperor of it or if he and Allitta end up getting together (if they do, it will be either awful and ruin the first book for me, or it will be bitchy and prickly and political and awesome, no middle ground, which is probably why I haven't been in too much of a hurry to find the second book.)
And of course all of the above is a lie, because my actual favorite fictional royalty are the eight princesses from the series of fantasy novels I started writing in middle school. :D Aren't everyone's? And, heck, I've occasionally resolved to talk more about my original universes on here and it's a Friday evening, nobody will read this anyway, so why not. (You will probably see a lot of echoes of the above books in this.)
They are the eight daughters of a Queen of Appenall (this world never established male primogeniture as strongly as our Europe did, which means, among other more complicated things, a lot more queens and princess-heirs.)
The eight princesses, in order of age, are Ala, Ama, Anna, Appa, Ara, Asa, Ada, and Ava. (I do realize that if I ever try to publish this I will have to change the names, but I can keep them straight this way.)
Here is a rather old group portrait of the seven oldest when Ala is 23 and Ada is 14 and they are starting their adventures (Ava is only 8 at this point and often gets left out of stuff):
They have never entirely left me even if I have never yet managed to get much of their stories on paper - they live in a vaguely 14th-century vaguely-Europe as part of the universe a lot of my fiction is still set in, which has just a little bit more magic and a little bit more justice than ours (and also quite a lot more glaciers and saber-tooth cats as a result; the very earliest magic-users got together and figured out how to slow down climate change, see.)
Lately, as a result of all that Arthur-Prince-of-Wales AU Merlin fic I read, I have been mostly playing with them in a modern-day Royals AU though, which is kind of fascinating, the way their various stories change and stay the same as figureheads in 21st-century-analog-Europe instead of autocrats in 14th-century-analog-Europe.
Here is the short version of their histories in 21st Century AU:
Ala, aka HRH the Princess Royal, gets a Master's in engineering (the highest educational attainment of any in the royal family to date) and works at a major design firm, and in her mid-thirties marries Sgt. Major Richard Trawley, who refuses a title (they have no kids and largely stay out of the limelight.)
Ama, aka HM the Queen of Appenall, accepts the queendom after their mother abdicates and none of her sisters volunteer. She is greatly loved and has only a little trouble getting the laws changed so that she can marry HRH Evan, Prince Consort, who is Jewish-analog; they have four sons and the third inherits when Ama abdicates on her sixtieth birthday. (Evan's story started out as Ivanhoe fix-it fic and is a lot more complicated in the medieval version.)
HRH Princess Anna of Appenall spends most of her time up to her elbows in the stock market when she isn't being scandalously sinful with her billionaire boyfriend and illegitimate children or giving unwanted but always, in hindsight, correct, economic advice to the Cabinet.
HRH Princess Appa the Duchess of March Riding met HG the Duke when they were both working on graduate degrees in history. They are both tenured professors and spend as much time as possible ignoring the fact that they are royalty, as do their children.
HRH Prince Aaron of Appenall in the original is Princess Ara who spends most of her time dressed as a knight and living as a man. In 21st century he's trans, and yes, that did cause a lot of trouble for everybody, and he is pretty much resigned to spending the rest of his life as "the first transgender Royal"; but at least the Queen backs him all the way, and people have had to live through worse. (In fact, now that I think about it, Aaron's situation and how his mother failed to handle it in any constructive way was probably this universe's deciding factor in why the previous Queen was "strongly encouraged" to step down early.)
Asa, aka HIH the Grand Empress, married HIH Rupert, the Grand Emperor, the same year as Ama's coronation as Queen. There is a lot of teasing between them because the Grand Emperor has not had any sort of empire for several centuries, and Asa, despite vaguely outranking her sister, has very little in the way of royal duties and spends most of her time managing the family's interests, parenting her kids, and taunting the gossip magazines.
HRH Princess Ada of Appenall is actually kind of lost in modern-AU. In the original she winds up, among other things, a magic-user and a popular saint, but none of that really transfers over. She spends most of her time keeping her head down, running errands for the Queen and doing charity work. (She also secretly writes midlist novels under a pseudonym.)
HRH Princess Ava of Appenall quite enjoys being a princess and plays it for all it is worth while appearing in the company of a series of always-gorgeous girlfriends.
(In my head, two of them end up more happy in modern!AU, two of them end up less happy, and the other four come out even.)
asexual_fandom kink meme in honor of the day, but then I got distracted putting up bookshelves.(I live in a 10'X12' room that contains a twin bunkbed, a dresser, one window, a very small closet, and 172 feet of bookshelf. Most of which is at minimum double-shelved. And I have another 10 feet to go up as soon as I either figure out another way to find the studs or give up and put in molly bolts.
182 feet of shelving - the equivalent of 11 floor-to-ceiling bookcases - might seem like a lot, but according to LibraryThing, I actually need about 240 feet. Um. Yep, that sounds about right.
...I could theoretically get that much shelving in here if I had bookshelves floor-to-ceiling on all the walls but then there would be no place for a, y'know, bed. It may yet get to that point.)
And since the Mad Hattery blog is still down (I'm only in it for the hats, folks) instead I shall do the
fannish5, which is "Name your five favorite Royals from fiction", and I have altered it to "five favorite canon royal pairings from not-as-popular as they should be SF novels."Since some of you seem to actually like it when I talk about my favorite old SF novels.
1. Prince Rupert of the Rhine and Jennifer Alayne, from A Midsummer Tempest by Poul Anderson.
I can't remember whether I read A Midsummer Tempest before or after I read The Number of the Beast, but one or the other of them was my introduction to the fact that pro writers will totally write rampant, cracked-out crossover fanfic and call it pro-fic the minute they're popular enough to get away with it.
A Midsummer Tempest is steampunk AU RPF of the English Civil War crossed over with Shakespeare's comedies, plus the main characters randomly visit the Inn Between the Worlds halfway through and have drinks with characters from some of Anderson's other novels.
The main character is Prince Rupert of the Rhine, a historical figure whose actual RL biography can be best described as "epic" and who is one of those historical characters who is just better than you, at everything. However, this novel is set in a world where all of Shakespeare's plays are literally true, which means among other things that technology is several hundred years ahead in this timeline. Anyway Rupert gets captured and held by a Puritan gentleman who is obsessed by the new steam trains and has a beautiful ward named Jennifer who Rupert sort of cynically seduces in hopes of escaping, but when they do escape they fall into the hands of the fairy courts, whereupon Oberon and Titania Make Them Get Married and send them out to retrieve Prospero's books of magic in order to defend the last vestiges of the Old Ways from the Puritans.
...and then it gets crackier. Eventually there's a diving bell.
I like it because of the crack, because it is Renaissance steampunk before steampunk knew what it was, and because Rupert and Jennifer are just great characters - they are incredibly flawed as people in a lot of different ways but they do what needs to be done and have frequent Moments of Awesome and their relationship is possibly the most cynically unromantic and broken that two such fundamentally un-cynical and romantic and competent people could manage.
2. Amy and Perry from The Ordinary Princess by M.M. Kaye
Princess Amethyst of Ambergeldar was given the gift of ordinariness by her fairy godmother, Crustacea, and among other results nobody can quite manage to ever call her anything but Amy. She manages (through gifts from other fairy godmothers like patience and compassion) to be happily ordinary among all of her beautiful and accomplished sisters, until her royal mother finally decides something must be done and betrothes her sight unseen to the supposedly very handsome and very proper young King of a neighboring kingdom.
So Amy runs away. She lives merrily for about a year alone in the forest (which was of course my favorite part of the book) but eventually needs new warm clothes that she can't make herself, so she wanders to the castle of her supposed betrothed and willingly gets a job as an assistant kitchen maid, counting the days until she has enough money to buy her dress and run back to her shack in the forest. She sort of accidentally makes friends with a young courtier called Perry when they're both sneaking to the kitchens after hours, and they bond, until of course in the end it turns out that Perry is (would it even be a spoiler to tell you this?)
This was my absolute favorite book the year after I outgrew Heidi and it still has the power to make me very happy. It is my favorite princess book ever; nothing particularly dramatic happens but it does what it does perfectly and Amy and Perry are both wonderful while being far more ordinary than heroic.
3. Fred Fritz and Anthony Villiers from The Thurb Revolution by Alexei Panshin
This is that SF of Manners I requested for Yuletide in 2009. Okay, technically Fred/Anthony isn't the canon pairing, but c'mon, IT ISN'T EVEN SUBTEXT. And I do like the person Fred eventually more-or-less ends up with, but the gender issues around said person are too confusing and problematic for me to go into detail here (plus spoilers!)
I actually strongly suspect Fred and/or Anthony of being pretty much asexual aromantic, and their relationships with their respective equally noble and equally unconventional spouses ... get very little play in the books, but I really wish they got more.
4. Prince Heir Josquin of Landuc and Prince Dewar from A Sorcerer and a Gentleman and sequels by Elizabeth Willey
Josquin/Dewar, on the other hand, is canon, though it doesn't get nearly enough attention in the books either. This is the series I have been know to describe as "Chronicles of Amber if it had been written by a slash writer" - I have no idea if Willey ever wrote fic, but this series takes the basic set-up of Chronicles of Amber, concentrates a lot more on the relationships and politics among the royals, makes half the characters bi or gay, and throws in everything from soulbonds to huddling for warmth.
Jos is actually my favorite character in the books. He's the heir to the guy who starts out as King of Everything, which must be an uncomfortable position, especially when the King is functionally immortal, your only role is to be married off for political purposes, and you're about a 6 on the Kinsey scale. Jos survives by refusing to take anything more seriously than it needs to be (and noticing the things that should be taken seriously, sometimes when everyone else is too busy with angst to notice.) He doesn't get nearly as much airtime as he should, and his thing with Dewar mosty cools down once they find out they're first cousins and politics gets involved, but the series opens with Dewar sneaking out of the Prince's bedchamber the morning after and fleeing the city before the King finds out what else he has despoiled, which was basically the point at which I decided I was going to like the series. :D
5. Morgon, Prince of Hed, and Raederle of An from the Riddle of Stars series by Patricia McKillip.
Raederle's hand was promised by her father, the King of An, to anyone who won a legendary Riddle-Game with a ghost. Raederle's childhood friend, Morgon, won the riddle-game - but didn't know that Raederle was part of the prize. He didn't even tell anybody he'd won, because he only played to see if he could, which left Raederle in something of a pickle when the ghost started telling people the game had already been won.
When Morgon finds out, he sets out for An to give Raederle back her choices, but he gets a bit sidetracked on the way, and in fact the whole trilogy could kind of be summarized as "How Morgon of Hed did not marry Raederle of An." By the time they finally meet up again they've both kind of outgrown silly things like betrothals, marriage, princes and true love, but the relationship between the two of them, unconventional as it is, is always the axis on which their world spins.
Relationships that didn't make the cut:
Prince Herewiss of the Brightwood & Prince Freelorn of Arlen & Segnbora & Queen Eftgan of Darthen & Royal Consort Wyn & Hasai & Sunspark - because I just talked about the Middle Kingdoms and how awesome they are; also Dairine & Roshaun from Young Wizards and the Empress of the Rihannsu & J'm Kirk - because I need to talk about authors other than Diane Duane sometimes
Emperor Gregor Vorbarra and Dr. Laisa Toscane - not obscure enough.
King Mendanbar and Queen Cimorene of the Enchanted Forest books (also King Tokoz and Queen Oraun of the Dragons) - because Patricia C. Wrede is still a little bit spoilt for me. :/
Nerilka and Alessan, Lady and Lord Holder of Ruatha - because Pern.
Hynkkel and Allitta of the Five Queendoms from Mark of the Cat by Andre Norton - because I still haven't got my hands on the second book and I don't know if Hynkkel actually manages to make an emperor of it or if he and Allitta end up getting together (if they do, it will be either awful and ruin the first book for me, or it will be bitchy and prickly and political and awesome, no middle ground, which is probably why I haven't been in too much of a hurry to find the second book.)
And of course all of the above is a lie, because my actual favorite fictional royalty are the eight princesses from the series of fantasy novels I started writing in middle school. :D Aren't everyone's? And, heck, I've occasionally resolved to talk more about my original universes on here and it's a Friday evening, nobody will read this anyway, so why not. (You will probably see a lot of echoes of the above books in this.)
They are the eight daughters of a Queen of Appenall (this world never established male primogeniture as strongly as our Europe did, which means, among other more complicated things, a lot more queens and princess-heirs.)
The eight princesses, in order of age, are Ala, Ama, Anna, Appa, Ara, Asa, Ada, and Ava. (I do realize that if I ever try to publish this I will have to change the names, but I can keep them straight this way.)
Here is a rather old group portrait of the seven oldest when Ala is 23 and Ada is 14 and they are starting their adventures (Ava is only 8 at this point and often gets left out of stuff):
They have never entirely left me even if I have never yet managed to get much of their stories on paper - they live in a vaguely 14th-century vaguely-Europe as part of the universe a lot of my fiction is still set in, which has just a little bit more magic and a little bit more justice than ours (and also quite a lot more glaciers and saber-tooth cats as a result; the very earliest magic-users got together and figured out how to slow down climate change, see.)
Lately, as a result of all that Arthur-Prince-of-Wales AU Merlin fic I read, I have been mostly playing with them in a modern-day Royals AU though, which is kind of fascinating, the way their various stories change and stay the same as figureheads in 21st-century-analog-Europe instead of autocrats in 14th-century-analog-Europe.
Here is the short version of their histories in 21st Century AU:
Ala, aka HRH the Princess Royal, gets a Master's in engineering (the highest educational attainment of any in the royal family to date) and works at a major design firm, and in her mid-thirties marries Sgt. Major Richard Trawley, who refuses a title (they have no kids and largely stay out of the limelight.)
Ama, aka HM the Queen of Appenall, accepts the queendom after their mother abdicates and none of her sisters volunteer. She is greatly loved and has only a little trouble getting the laws changed so that she can marry HRH Evan, Prince Consort, who is Jewish-analog; they have four sons and the third inherits when Ama abdicates on her sixtieth birthday. (Evan's story started out as Ivanhoe fix-it fic and is a lot more complicated in the medieval version.)
HRH Princess Anna of Appenall spends most of her time up to her elbows in the stock market when she isn't being scandalously sinful with her billionaire boyfriend and illegitimate children or giving unwanted but always, in hindsight, correct, economic advice to the Cabinet.
HRH Princess Appa the Duchess of March Riding met HG the Duke when they were both working on graduate degrees in history. They are both tenured professors and spend as much time as possible ignoring the fact that they are royalty, as do their children.
HRH Prince Aaron of Appenall in the original is Princess Ara who spends most of her time dressed as a knight and living as a man. In 21st century he's trans, and yes, that did cause a lot of trouble for everybody, and he is pretty much resigned to spending the rest of his life as "the first transgender Royal"; but at least the Queen backs him all the way, and people have had to live through worse. (In fact, now that I think about it, Aaron's situation and how his mother failed to handle it in any constructive way was probably this universe's deciding factor in why the previous Queen was "strongly encouraged" to step down early.)
Asa, aka HIH the Grand Empress, married HIH Rupert, the Grand Emperor, the same year as Ama's coronation as Queen. There is a lot of teasing between them because the Grand Emperor has not had any sort of empire for several centuries, and Asa, despite vaguely outranking her sister, has very little in the way of royal duties and spends most of her time managing the family's interests, parenting her kids, and taunting the gossip magazines.
HRH Princess Ada of Appenall is actually kind of lost in modern-AU. In the original she winds up, among other things, a magic-user and a popular saint, but none of that really transfers over. She spends most of her time keeping her head down, running errands for the Queen and doing charity work. (She also secretly writes midlist novels under a pseudonym.)
HRH Princess Ava of Appenall quite enjoys being a princess and plays it for all it is worth while appearing in the company of a series of always-gorgeous girlfriends.
(In my head, two of them end up more happy in modern!AU, two of them end up less happy, and the other four come out even.)
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First, Gregor/Laisa asexualfic, YES PLEASE. I could easily believe in an asexual romantic Gregor, and a relationship of permanent love and partnership in which the babies are all made by uterine replicator. Laisa's such a cipher in canon that really, ficcers can do anything with her. If you write it, please link it.
Second, Amy and Perry: ♥
Third, I have not read A Sorcerer and a Gentleman but I clearly must. It goes on the to-read-once-the-diss-is-filed list.
Fourth, MORGON AND RAEDERLE YESSSSSSSS. Raederle won't wait at home for Morgon to be ready for her, and she won't stop changing for his sake, and Morgon gets too distracted by MAGIC to keep track of her, and... well, they'll meet up every hundred years for the rest of their lives, which is about as close as they want to get to happily ever after.
Finally, I am charmed by your modern-AU princesses and would be delighted to hear more.
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Gosh I love their relationship. They are a million hearts.
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I am not sure I will ever do much with the modern-AU princesses, other than daydream. Except possibly draw them in amazing hats. :P
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I love Ordinary Princess to pieces, despite having only read it once when I was ten. I really do need to get a copy for myself!
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Ordinary Princess was the first book I have any record of having written fic for! (Crustacea gave them prophecies for their wedding present; she was asking for it.)
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Also, drat it, you've just increased the length of my to-read list by TOO MANY BOOKS.
Also, I really love your princess origfic!
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The Gregor/Laisa *may* yet happen.
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That is exciting on the Gregor/Laisa possibility front!