Seanan McGuire (seanan_mcguire) wrote,
Seanan McGuire
seanan_mcguire

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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
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.
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.
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?

No, naga are naga.
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?)