The politics do become relevant, yes, but the stories are always more about the people. That seems to be Monette's pattern; she did the same thing as Katherine Addison in The Goblin Emperor.
Also, Shannon Teverius shows up again in the third book, The Mirador. He even gets character development!
The second book in the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, The Virtu, is basically an extremely eventful road trip. TV Tropes describes it (accurately) as having "a dark spell, a death goddess, a couple of jailbreaks, a mutilation, two scheming sidekicks, straight sex, gay sex, and, at the end, a close call with burning at the stake."
But it really did read EXACTLY like an AU darkfic of some other canon. Especially the way there were all these hints that there was supposed to be an actual plot in there somewhere but it kept getting shunted aside in favor of more H/C.
Now you've got me picturing it as an anime starring the dark wizard and necromancer Nobuyuki (it means "trust and happiness", much as Felix means "happy" in Latin) and the thief Kazuo (which means "harmony/peace" and "man", which seems to match the name of MILDmay pretty well). I can just see what they would look like--Nobuyuki, all long bright red hair and Costume Porn, and Kazuo, with short dark red hair and a scarred cheek. I wish I could draw!
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Also, Shannon Teverius shows up again in the third book, The Mirador. He even gets character development!
The second book in the Doctrine of Labyrinths series, The Virtu, is basically an extremely eventful road trip. TV Tropes describes it (accurately) as having "a dark spell, a death goddess, a couple of jailbreaks, a mutilation, two scheming sidekicks, straight sex, gay sex, and, at the end, a close call with burning at the stake."
But it really did read EXACTLY like an AU darkfic of some other canon. Especially the way there were all these hints that there was supposed to be an actual plot in there somewhere but it kept getting shunted aside in favor of more H/C.
Now you've got me picturing it as an anime starring the dark wizard and necromancer Nobuyuki (it means "trust and happiness", much as Felix means "happy" in Latin) and the thief Kazuo (which means "harmony/peace" and "man", which seems to match the name of MILDmay pretty well). I can just see what they would look like--Nobuyuki, all long bright red hair and Costume Porn, and Kazuo, with short dark red hair and a scarred cheek. I wish I could draw!