Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire
  • Mood: tired
  • Music: Pippin, "Simple Joys."

HALF-OFF RAGNAROK open thread!

To celebrate the release of Half-Off Ragnarok, here. Have an open thread to discuss the book. Judging by the comments I'm seeing, some of you've have had time, while others received review copies.

THERE WILL BE SPOILERS.

Seriously. If anyone comments here at all, THERE WILL BE SPOILERS. So please don't read and then yell at me because you encountered spoilers. You were warned. (I will not reply to every comment; I call partial comment amnesty. But I may well join some of the discussion, or answer questions or whatnot.) I will be DELETING all comments containing spoilers which have been left on other posts. No one gets to spoil people here without a label.

You can also start a discussion at my website forums, with less need to be concerned that I will see everything you say! In case you wanted, you know, discussion free of authorial influence, since I always wind up getting involved in these things.

Have fun, and try not to bleed on the carpet.
Tags: halfoff ragnarok, open thread
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  • 111 comments

acelightning

March 10 2014, 16:19:47 UTC 3 years ago

The things Sarah says, and the way she behaves, while she's trying to reboot her poor bruised brain, remind me poignantly of brilliant, telepathic, damaged River Tam in Firefly/Serenity. It broke my heart every time she lost her math. So far, Sarah and the mice are tied for "my favorite character" in the Incryptid series. (Are we ever going to meet Artie?)

I also see strong parallels between the reproductive habits of Wadjets and Dragons. It grates on me just slightly that, while "Wadjet" was an Egyptian snake-goddess (among many other things, She is the cobra on Pharaoh's crown), the Wadjets in the book are depicted as coming from the Indian subcontinent. But Chandi's personality makes up for it.

tiferet

March 11 2014, 18:16:20 UTC 3 years ago

Do we know if all the Wadjets came originally from the Indian subcontinent? Because honestly, first the Ptolemies, then Islam...Egypt has had lots of different rulers since the days of the goddess Wadjet, and I can see the Wadjets spreading from there through North Africa, Persia, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent, and India proper would be friendlier than many places, and once you've lived somewhere long enough you do start speaking the language and naming your kids in it.

acelightning

March 12 2014, 09:11:38 UTC 3 years ago

This may also imply some sort of connection between Wadjets and Madhura.

brightlotusmoon

March 12 2014, 00:04:45 UTC 3 years ago

River. YES. I had the same thought.

I'm disabled in physical, mental, neurological, developmental, and neurodivergent ways*, and I relate to both Sarah and River in scary ways, because there are times when my own brain gets away and I'm floating in my own neuronal essence of WTF. I watch myself from inside and my heart breaks every time I cannot explain what I need. Seanan has does an amazing, fantastic job with her portrayal of Sarah.


(*cerebral palsy (with white matter death), temporal lobe epilepsy, fibromyalgia (which kills gray matter), autism, disintegrating memory, insomnia, panic disorder, major depression, Nonverbal learning disability, sensory processing dysfunction, etc)

acelightning

March 12 2014, 09:24:33 UTC 3 years ago

I'm not disabled, but I have lost many of the talents of mind and brain that I was born with, for an assortment of reasons... I, too, identify with River and Sarah. I hope Seanan writes Sarah making a complete (or very nearly complete) recovery.

tylik

March 14 2014, 18:21:02 UTC 3 years ago

I just have to applaud you for using neurodivergent in an explicitly broad way. Neurodiverse, not autistic.* Totally support spectrum pride, but I *so* often hear "neurotypical" used to mean "not autistic" and it makes me wince every time.

* And really, I'd have to call my less neurotypical features pretty broadly a plus in my life, though the complications have sometimes been a bit painful.

jenfullmoon

March 12 2014, 15:30:06 UTC 3 years ago

Yeah, I want to meet more of the Harringtons. Hell, I want all the relatives. Some crazy family reunion, even.

acelightning

March 12 2014, 21:28:09 UTC 3 years ago

There's a lot of backstory, and ancestors, in the downloadable short stories. But, yeah, I want to meet 'em all too!

seanan_mcguire

March 27 2014, 18:55:55 UTC 3 years ago

Remember that a lot of the time, when we meet "the same thing" in two different places, we give it the same name. Tigers are tigers, regardless of where in the world they're found. Ergo, wadjet are wadjet, no matter where in the world they're found. The Egyptian wadjet were unfortunately wiped out a long time ago, being somewhat smaller and more tied to heavily human-populated areas during a time when the Covenant came through on the regular.

acelightning

March 28 2014, 03:52:03 UTC 3 years ago

The Spanish invaders explorers in Central and South America called the indigenous jaguars tigres, although the two varieties of large cats aren't all that closely related - and apparently the conquistadores couldn't differentiate between spots and stripes. A jaguar is not a tiger, and I suspect the jaguars (and possibly also the tigers) are somewhat miffed about the mis-identification. Although if the defining feature of (male) wadjets is the cobra-like hood, I suppose very few people would mistake a wadjet for, say, a lamia.

Is an Indian Nāga a wadjet, then?

seanan_mcguire

March 31 2014, 20:25:32 UTC 3 years ago

No, naga are naga.

acelightning

April 1 2014, 00:35:32 UTC 3 years ago

So, a naga, a wadjet, and a dragon princess walk into a bar...

(Are there any cryptid species with humanoid males and females that look completely alien?)