Drizzt Liveblog Part 1
Feb. 13th, 2024 06:09 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolffylunaY'all are getting this before tumblr, because the ability to have multiple cuts in one post means I can have everything in one post.
Homeland Liveblog
I'm copy-pasting this from discord. Ellipses differentiate liveblogs that were done at different times.
I'm rereading the first Drizzt novel. It was one of the book series I loved loved loved when I was young. I am simultaneously going:
- oh my God, this world building. Your legal system cannot run on vibes, sir. The implied gender ratio is hilarious (drow nobles want lots of kids, but every son after the second is killed, so a family having four daughters and two sons is pretty normal. Oh, and it's implied that polyandry is a Status Symbol)
- oof ow argh, man hands misery onto man! It deepens like a coastal shelf! 😭
I'm still at the beginning, but drizzt is being raised by his older sister, and she is heavily encouraged to physically abuse him. There's a point where she thinks "wow, what could this kid achieve if we weren't breaking his spirit. ... wait, that's a blasphemous thought, I should punish him for making me think that." And Drizzt is taught to believe that surface elves are the source of all of his problems, to the point that whenever he's whipped he "cries out for the death of a [surface elf]" These people all could have been fine if they lived in a reasonable society! 😭
The book is divided into parts, and at the beginning of each part there's a section of Drizzt monologing as if he's giving an interview
And in the one where he's talking about his childhood, he both talks about PTSD-flashbacks-in-so- many-words and also "presumably things happened before I was sixteen? I remember basically none of that though" which. Baby. Let me scoop you up into a hug even though you are a century(?) old dark elf who is presumably taller than me.
...
The only way the drow gender ratio doesn't fall flat is a) the implication that commoners don't do that, so maybe their gender ratios are less of a disaster and b) it looks like only the female heads of the family can take consorts/have children, so polyandry is a little more possible
Though this does, like, raise the question of "so, you are the daughter of a matron mother, and you fall pregnant. what do you do?"
...
It's legal for a drow house to attack another in secret. It is illegal to do it openly. The justification is that Lolth likes it that way (This is a logic that underpins a lot of the drow legal system) And it could be made sensible with just one small change: Every drow house wants to be able to attack another, but wants no other house to be able to attack them. So they created norms where you can't just attack people, if you did that the whole city would fall on you ...but if you can do it with plausible deniability...
...
I have now re-witnessed the beautiful, beautiful scene where a wizard panics* and casts fireball at his own feet
*he would say he was very tactical, I do not believe him
[Seriously, I have remembered this scene fondly for years. It's Such A Scene.]
...
Oh my God Masoj just encouraged someone to take the identity of someone he [the other guy] just killed. Masoj completely failed to mention that the dead guy was his brother.
...
DRIZZT QQ
His dad just tried and failed to kill him to try and maintain his innocence.
I have so many feelings about Zaknafein.
Just. The combination of "Zaknafein was a major role model to Drizzt and is a significant part of why Drizzt is good" and "Zaknafein is Not A Very Good Person." Man.
...
Lov Drizzt
He just nearly got murdered, but he doesn't care, because KITTY!
Drizzt is this xkcd comic
...
I remembered the sex pollen scene, but man did I not remember/parse how much it was a dub-to-non con sex pollen scene
...
Something that is also getting to me on this re-read: the amount that the men of the Do'Urden family 🐛 assist with their family members whipping them, or literally taking them as a sacrifice. Because resistance would only make it worse, and this way at least you have some control
There's a really telling passage where Briza is torturing Dinin for no real reason, and he's just like. okay. i'm not going to get in the way of this process. And he actively positions himself to make it easier.
...
Help, I'm combining my love of "what if popular but misapplied blorbo song, but correctly applied?" with the Legends of Drizzt series: Eat Your Young is a valid Malice/Zaknafein song
There is no capitalism, but there is a lot of zero sum resource fights, and a lot of the conflict between these chatacters is their children being used in those zero sum resource fights.
Zaknafein has a lot of conflict about whether it's better for his son to be eaten by drow society, or dead And there's a thing where both Zaknafein and Drizzt are/are meant to be sacrifices to Lolth, at Malice's hands
Skinning the children for a war drum Putting food on the table selling bombs and guns It's quicker and easier to eat your young
And there's also the whole thing of-- Zaknafein and Malice's life is luxurious, but that's at a cost. There are no skeletons in the closet because they are displaying the skeletons openly as part of the decor
...
The Drizzt He destroyed his cage Yes YES The Drizzt is out
...
The thing about Homeland in particular is how it is simultaneously man hands on misery onto man, it deepens like a coastal shelf and how it is so much about it's opposite (it ascends like a volcano?) Drizzt could not be who is he is, could not be good, without Zaknafein.
But he's. Better than Zaknafein. Because of Zaknafein.
And there's the tragedy of the fact that if their roles were reversed, it would be Drizzt bring Zaknafein up into the light.
But. Well. Drizzt would still have to die down in the dark
...
...hmm.. I'm encountering a tempting bad idea: 50 books in a year is a doable challenge. There are 40 Drizzt books. Ergo, one could hypothetically read all the Drizzt books in one year.
I have only just started, but I don't want it to get lost in my discord channel, so here's the Thought From The First Few Chapters:
today in readings that are almost certainly not what the author intended, yet are textually supported: Drizzt ends up temporarily as part of a median system
The thing with Drizzt vs The Hunter (which is monomaniacally obsessed with survival) is most likely to be a metaphor, but the Hunter does seem to be a separate entity? Also he has been incredibly isolated for a decade, so "survival instincts have started to become a person, and have started to be in the driver's seat" seems pretty plausible.
Upd8: I don't think Salvatore knows what he has written, but the Drizzt vs the Hunter thing is getting less explainable as a metaphor. The Hunter keeps consistently having goal's slightly orthogonal to Drizzt, and being in control with Drizzt later going "???? what did I just do?" about it. I don't think this is intentional, but. YEAH.
Queer Drow and not-Drizzt fic ideas
Not directly Drizzt related thoughts, resurfaced by reading the book anyway:
- "Female Adventurer/Male Drow She Captured Who Wants Her To Keep Him" is a great premise and I should really write some more variations on that.
- someone should really do worldbuilding about queer drow, especially gender nonconforming drow. You cannot tell me there aren't butch and effeminate drow, and they are going to be interesting (because you've got the fact that the drow have a distinctive idea about what 'masculine' and 'feminine' mean, but also they would as a society be awful about being gender non-conforming.)
(Another thing re: gender non-conforming drow is that in some ways drow masculinity overlaps with 🐛 anglophone masculinity in that it can be About Protection, but it's also a lot about Being Attractive, which is going to make the drow conception of 'butch lesbian' Interesting.)
... [re: a discussion about drow gender worldbuilding in my discord channel]
One of the things I find really interesting about the Eilastraeeans is:
- for along time the clergy where all women because it was thought that you had to be to ~truly understand the goddess~, and then it was changed so that male clergy were allowed as long as they spent some time shapeshifted into a woman, and then eventually male clergy were just straightforwardly allowed. and I know this is probably for Doylist reasons, but I am fascinated by the possibility if intra-religious Watsonian sniping going on here
- there's this whole thing about Eilastraee being an idealised mother, and her clerics are meant to be mother figures to their clergy, and like. The vast majority of drow have a Deeply Alarming conception of motherhood. I feel like it would be worthwhile exploring "people who are trying their best to be good, but their models of stuff are often screwed up, and now they are trying to make Structures Happen"
I get why it's not necessarily dug into, but one of the things that I like about Eilastraeeans is all the ways that they are 🐛 striving for the good, striving to be better, but in many wasy are fundamentally shaped by being people who were raised by Lolthite society, even if they left.
They are doing their best but sometimes it's bad!
They're still a matriarchy, they just have a 🐛 more noble ideal of a matriarch
Fun fact: back in the day, I wrote 0 Drizzt fanfic. Right now, I am considering writing more.
So the thing about graduation sex pollen situation is that it's a socially mediated fuck or die situation. The ~incense will not kill you, people thinking your blasphemous for not fucking will, and Drizzt got very, very lucky he was able to run and only his sister noticed.
this incident seems very 🐛 formative and deeply shaping of his sexuality. I have not got up to the point where he is courting Catti-Brie, but I am super willing to bet this incident kind of looms over that
so, obviously, what one needs to do in fic is put Drizzt in a second fuck or die sex pollen incident, but this time one that's physically mediated. you cannot sneak or talk your way out of it-- if you do not have sex you will be poisoned and die. I don't think Catti Brie should be there, but I think Wulfgar should? I'd need to get up to when they are introduced to work out what would be the best combination of sparkly to 'I do want Drizzt to live'
because Drizzt's reaction to himself being fuck or die sex pollened is "[shrug] well, I had a good run while it lasted" However his reaction to someone else being fuck or die sex pollened becomes a war between his deep desire to save people no matter the personal risk and "...I CANT DO THAT." So you have maybe-Wulfgar, you know, not having a good time but definitely much preferring fucking an ally over dying, even in adverse circumstances. Meanwhile Drizzt is externally "😐 " while internally climbing to the highest boughs of the freakout tree.
Drizzt is very whumpable, is the thing.
hmm, I'm now thinking about which is more fun:
The sex pollen is a natural phenomena. This is fun because Drizzt is a ranger, he's a nature guy and he is 🐛 aware of nature red in tooth and claw, but it's still 🐛 a betrayal.
The sex pollen is an attack by an antagonist, and there's an audience. Because this will rhyme super interestingly with the canonical sex pollen: Drizzt had A Lot of Objections to that situation, but one of them was to their being an audience. So it has advantages at putting Drizzt even further up the freak out tree! The con is it's much harder to come up with a cogent explanation for "so, why isn't the antagonist very dead of angry ranger with scimitars?"
[friend suggests that maybe natural sex pollen with audience is an option] That's a good thought. I think even with an audience he can trivially leave or tell to go away, it is still going to put him even further up the freakout tree.
no subject
Date: 2024-02-13 10:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-02-14 06:15 am (UTC)Most of the time I remember that this meaning is very specific to that discord server, and replace them with tildes if I'm posting something elsewhere.
...some of the time I completely forget that using caterpillar emojis for that is unusual, and leave them in.