TODAY I AM A DARKOVER BOOK

[snarp]

COMYN LORD: I am so angry and celibate! It has something to do with my psychic powers.

HIS DAD: Cry moar. You are going to be a warrior and awesome and give me millions of awesome grandchildren because I have inadequacy issues.

COMYN LORD: I hate you, father! I fantasize about killing you with such eerie vividness that I must flee the room to rest my burning forehead against the cool stones of the corridor wall, terrified by how near I have come to patricide this day.

HIS DAD: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LADY: HI I’M HERE FOR THE ARRANGED MARRIAGE

COMYN LORD: You are so impossibly beautiful and innocent that I cannot bear even to look at you with my impure, lustful eyes.

COMYN LADY: (That is normal on Darkover.)

COMYN LORD: Women in your family tend to die in childbirth, and children in my family tend to go mad when their psychic powers develop at adolescence, and you’re a the Keeper of a Tower and psychologically conditioned to kill men who lust after you.

COMYN LADY: I am also your first cousin.

COMYN LORD: Alas, though we are madly in love already, we cannot possibly consummate our marriage.

COMYN LADY: Even though we’re telepaths, and that will eventually drive us mad?

COMYN LORD: Yup. It’s pretty crazy how often this exact situation arises on Darkover, isn’t it?

COMYN LADY: Yeah, I don’t even know.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD WHO LOOKS JUST LIKE THE HERO EXCEPT MEANER: I just did something! Something wicked and unnatural!

COMYN LORD AND LADY: *accidentally have sex due to wicked-and-unnatural-related stress*

COMYN LADY: I’m pregnant with your baby! It may be a monster. It may also be the promise of a better future, depends on the book.

SLIGHTLY YOUNGER COMYN LORD/LADY WHO HAS SUCH POTENTIAL: I just did something! Something selfish and ignorant!

HIS DAD AGAIN: It’s my fault because I raised him/her wrong, but I don’t realize it.

COMYN LORD: I dare not raise my voice to my father - his heart is weak, and it would kill him.

COMYN LADY: *miscarries due to selfish-and-ignorant-related stress*

COMYN LORD: DADDY I AM REPLACING YOU WITH AN AUNT FROM A GEORGETTE HEYER NOVEL

HIS DAD AGAIN: *is killed by his weak heart*

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: Say, have I mentioned that I am a sexual deviant in some manner? Maybe I’m a pedophile, or I keep nonhuman sex slaves. I could be into wife-swapping? Definitely bondage. Probbbably not a furry.

COMYN LADY: There was a furry one time, but I don’t think that ever actually got explained.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: Oh, yeah. That was weird.

COMYN LORD: He was like, a cat, right? Was Bradley already hanging around with Mercedes Lackey then?

COMYN LADY: No, too early. Lackey must have gotten the idea from her.

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: It is not inconceivable that both arrived at the evil catman idea independently. Anyway, my point was that you can tell I’m evil because of the sex stuff. Let’s have a final battle now.

COMYN LORD AND LADY JOIN FORCES AND FORM A BAND THE LIKES OF WHICH HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN, AND THEY CALL THEMSELVES SOMETHING TOTALLY DUMBSHIT, LIKE “THE FORBIDDEN TOWER.”

SLIGHTLY OLDER COMYN LORD: I see the error of my sexy ways. It is notable that I have already produced many more children than the two of you ever will, so ensuring a robust population of villains and men with inadequacy issues with which to populate later books. *dies*

SLIGHTLY YOUNGER COMYN LORD/LADY: *is maybe also dead*

COMYN LORD: …so, my psychic powers tell me we will have a baby someday, so we had better get on that. Even though tragedy lays in our child’s future!

COMYN LADY: We will live happily ever after until we are slaughtered in the events of a later book.

SPACESHIPS: (There were also spaceships in this book.)

-

Possibly Also Relevant To Your Interests: Anne Bishop.

(Crossposted to SarahPin.com, Dreamwidth, and LiveJournal. You can leave comments at whichever.)

Comments

[holyschist]

This is hilarious and SO TRUE and now I want to reread all the Darkover books.

[snarp]

I'd actually only read two of them before, but suddenly I have started reading them and cannot stop.

[inkstone]

::laughs until she cries::

So true!!

[snarp]

I begin to conflate all the emo lords and asexual ladies in my mind!

[meganbmoore]

*terrified, yet enthralled*

[telophase]

Have you read any Darkover? My adolescence was full of them, which may explain a lot.

[sara]

*cackles violently* YES THIS EXACTLY.

And it was awesome and we loved it.

[cofax7]

We TOTALLY DID.

::weeps for my younger self::

[starlady]

*scrapes jaw off floor*

Obi-Wan! Tell me it's not true!

[torachan]

LOL This is awesome.

[thinking_lotus]

I am having severe flashbacks.

Hold me.

[lacrimawanders.livejournal.com]

*applause*

[snarp]

*bows, bows more*

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Right, there's no mystery at all about why I couldn't get into these, then!

I kept wondering if something was wrong with me at the time.

[snarp]

Some of them are okay! My favorite is Stormqueen!, which actually has an exclamation point in its title.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

May I link to this?

[snarp]

Go nuts!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

♥

My favorites are the ones with Extremely Emo Gay Relationships That Everyone Feels Guilty About.

[snarp]

Agreed! I haven't read enough of them to templatize them yet; I just read Heritage of Hastur for the first time. It is deeply amazing.

[mercwriter.livejournal.com]

That was awesome. (I've never read the book but now I want to, just so I can hear this narrative in the back of my mind the whole time. Which would be even more awesome.)

*hats off to you*

[llennhoff.livejournal.com]

That is EXACTLY right. Well done.

[maverick-weirdo.livejournal.com]

You forgot to mention that the Moons are to blame for any wicked, unnatural, selfish, ignorant, or accidental sex acts

[caprine.livejournal.com]

And the Ghost Wind! Damn that intoxicating pollen.

[alexey-rom.livejournal.com]

Great!

[chuk-g.livejournal.com]

I wish you'd written this before I read any of the books, would have saved me so much time.

[http://users.livejournal.com/krin_o_o_/]

well done!

[bolindbergh]

You forgot the bits about mandatory sex with your sister-in-law while your wife is pregnant. ;-)

[snarp]

I did! I should have worked that in.

[jeriendhal.livejournal.com]

Aaaaand I'm so glad I never picked these books up. Of course now I'm going to keep imagining them having incestous relationships with McCaffrey's Pern books. :)

[dragoness-e.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed MZB's Darkover in college. Of course, back then any sub-text went "swoosh!" over my head. What pissed me off, however, was inconsistent characterization from book to book, particularly of minor characters. Relatively nice supporting character Y, would, for no explicable reason, turn into frothing villain Y in another novel.

[sanj.livejournal.com]

PERFECT. Well, plus the Awesome Separatist Commune Where We Invent Feminism, Which Has Strangely Not Been Invented By the People in the Spaceships.

[jeffreyab.livejournal.com]

You left out the hermaphrodites and the Dry Towners and the Ya Men and Port Chicago on the part of Darkover that never gets mentioned which is everything to the north of the Wall Around the World.

I stopped reading them in the late 70's they seemed to have changed a bit since then.

[archangelbeth]

The Dry Towners are totally recycled from a prior book of hers which is now available on Project Gutenberg: The Door Through Space.

Totally. Recycled. Entirely.

[patgund.livejournal.com]

I spent way the hell too many teenage years reading these books (at least until "City of Sorcery", which was so GODS AWFUL I couldn't stand reading any of it again.

You hit it dead on.

[azurelunatic]

*giggle*

The chains of linking that brought me here (more than one) all originate with james_nicoll.

(just a drop in from a link chain)

[juliansinger.livejournal.com]

God, this is SO TRUE.

I look forward to the Hasturization. Eventually.