The explosion of breadth and stakes between The Wolf of Oren-yaro and The Ikessar Falcon has been commented on for years, and I wanted to talk about some more why this difference exists, why the tone is somewhat different for both epic fantasy books. (I also wrote a post before on why this series should be read chronologically).
The Chronicles of the Bitch Queen is about, among all the other things it touches on, power.
Power, even when you don’t think you have it.
Power, even when the whole world is against you.
It is about a woman who believes herself oppressed but created chaos with the slightest flick of her fingers.
The first book, The Wolf of Oren-yaro, is claustrophobic, the focus narrow. It’s less epic and more thriller (in fact, I keep calling it epic but it’s technically a sword-and-sorcery fantasy book. The epic is important though to signal that it doesn’t end here, it is only complete if you read it as a trilogy. Which if you’re reading this without context might be a good time to mention The Ikessar Falcon has been out since September of last year and the third book is out this May). Talyien is helpless, alone with her thoughts, angry at the world and her husband and her father and just about everything. This is important, because if you give someone the title of queen everyone assumes she is automatically powerful in the sense that she can do anything (in fact, despite the care I took in showing why Talyien couldn’t just do ‘anything,’ people still got angry). If you followed the series in order, you would have experienced this chaos and learned not just how her mind space worked, but how she viewed the politics in that world.
She feels powerless. A queen with no king, beset by enemies in all corners. And it is not exactly incorrect, but…
She still has privilege. Privilege has nothing to do with how you personally feel about your circumstances. It is how the world views you. And that has power. It means a white woman can call the cops on a Black man and get him killed. It plays a role in just about everything: whose word is believed, whose experience is recognized, whose authority is respected, who gets the job, who gets the promotion, and yes, who lives or dies.
I’ve experienced it from both sides of the fence. In Canada, I’ve experienced micro-aggressions for being a person of colour. In school, SEAsians were on the lower rung of social dynamics, and we Filipinos had to learn to live with being viewed as the “lesser Asians,” the FOBs the other students sneered at and the teachers didn’t have a problem insulting. I know what it’s like to be spoken over, to have words I’ve said be repeated by someone with more privilege and then, only then, have them heard. I know what it’s like to be ignored, to be treated badly for nothing I did and have it be all about the person who treated me badly in the first place–their comfort, over mine. Their mental health, over mine. I know what it’s like to have someone’s lie picked over my truth.
In the Philippines, I both didn’t have it and had it. We were poor as dirt: not only did my parents have no money, the families we came from didn’t, either. We had no powerful connections (my parents were considered ‘better-off’ because they were smart and had the ability to get better jobs, even though we lived in the slums in Manila). This was something we tried to hide because in the Philippines with its hidden castes ANY sign that you’re poor is a sign that you’re powerless which gives others the freedom to walk all over you, to not just treat you badly but sometimes even abuse you. You did this with “decent clothes,” with “proper English,” by not looking at people. This was very easy to do if you’re light-skinned. The light-skinned privilege (also called the “mukhang mayaman” e.g. “you look rich”) is so prevalent that I’ve seen how elders automatically favoured me over some of my darker-skinned cousins. Teachers have fawned over me for no reason.
Of course, people get angry at you for it. It doesn’t make the sting go away. I know what it’s like to be bullied by both neighbourhood kids and schoolmates. The latter disliked me so much they lied to me about the school bus during a storm once, which led me to being left alone in a flooded school (this is one of those stories I used to tell as a funny story, until it was pointed out to me by a friend in horror that it looked like those kids were trying to kill me).
That doesn’t change anything. Individual oppression has nothing to do with the status quo. Throughout the entire Chronicles of the Bitch Queen, these conversations often crop up between Khine (a person who shares my background of growing up in the slums) and Queen Talyien:
“There’s that,” he said with a small nod. “But there is also what people think you are and how the world bends itself around it. You turn your head and people follow your gaze. Who is she looking at? Why is she looking at them? And if you explain it, they will tear the words apart looking for a hidden meaning, and if you don’t, they will dig into the silence for something that may not be there.”
“It’s silly.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t. But that is the tune the whole world dances to. Some are born with the power to turn the tide even before they realize what they are doing. Others…aren’t. Some of us have to fight to make a difference from the moment we are born. We try to crest along calm waters because we are helpless against the tide, and even then, a single wave might be enough to sweep us away.”–The Ikessar Falcon
The Ikessar Falcon in particular really seeks to shed light on the theme of power hiding in the unlikeliest of places. The fact that this is a first-person POV, or that you don’t get an aside where a narrator patiently explains that this is in fact the (not even very well-hidden) theme of the entire series is beyond the point. Privilege doesn’t work as simply as people think it does. And Talyien doesn’t learn this easily. It’s a hard lesson. People die, their families’ lives forever changed. The Dragon of Jin-Sayeng will pick up from this.
The world isn’t always about us; we don’t live inside a bubble. How we interact with the world, what we ask from it, what we take from it, they’re all connected. Is it fair? Well, no, but it’s unfair for everyone. And the only thing we can do about that is to be more responsible in our thoughts and our own actions. It’s how we can try to change the world one little step at a time.
