gingerthimble

Hello! I'm also primeideal on Ao3. This is an all-Stormlight Archive signup, and I'm requesting both fic and art for all ships! Some of the freeforms will lend themselves more to certain ships than others, but feel free to mix and match.

Requested ships:

• Dalinar Kholin/Navani Kholin
• Hesina/Lirin
• Kmakl/Fen Rnamdi
• Lunamor/Tuaka
• Masha-daughter-Shaliv/Szeth-son-son-Vallano
• Palona/Turinad Sebarial
• Renarin Kholin/Rlain
• Shallan Davar/Adolin Kholin

General art likes:

• black and white art
• bright/bold colors
• traditional or digital art
• objects that represent/are strongly associated with characters
• fantastic/speculative worldbuilding elements
• in-universe artifacts/sketches that the characters might have drawn (similar in spirit to the snippets between chapters, although I'm not expecting Shallan-level expertise!)

General art dislikes (please don't consider these binding DNWs: if your interests or preferences lie strongly along these lines then feel free.)

• pastel-heavy palettes
• deliberately wildly disproportionate/chibi-like characters
• completely non-representational art

General fic likes:

Requested Prompts:

• Historical - Bard Immortalizes Wedding In Ballad To Couple's Delight Or Embarrassment
  
  • You know Wit would. And knowing him it would wind up as a traditional ballad in another place/time/somewhere else in the Cosmere. Or maybe the listeners adding to their traditional list of songs.
• Supernatural - Familiar/Magical Companion's POV on Human's Spouse
  • Doesn't literally need to be from the other character's POV, but something about the developing relationships between the spouse and the spren/other being. Adolin and Pattern? Shallan and Maya? Masha interviewing Nightblood for her book? The Sibling and the Stormfather bickering about how humans are the worst, and now they're inlaws?
• Wedding - Marriage Traditions in Different Cultures
  • Do peakspren ever show up to crash Horneater weddings? Palona is wearing a Herdazian marriage garment--more about that! What does a traditional Shin wedding look like for Masha and Szeth?
• Wedding Ceremony - Magic-related accidents during wedding
• A/B Read In-Universe RPF About Their Wedding 
• Epistolary media coverage/social media reaction/etc.
• In-Universe Rumors About A/B Secret Marriage
  • These would work well for Dalinar/Navani. (Especially "oh no Dalinar can read now, so much for secret women's documents.") But also, are there rumors about Renarin/Rlain? What do the common people of Thaylen think of the Prince Consort?
• Widowed - Marrying Sibling's Widow
• Established Marriage - Old Married Couple
• Established Marriage - Partners Can’t Keep Their Hands Off Each Other Even After Years Together
  • Fen and Kmakl definitely have this effect on people as they're pushing seventy.
• Anniversary: Tenth
  • We know ten is a very important number in Roshar lore. For Palona/Sebarial, their anniversary will be right around the end of the "timeskip" between books five and six--what's changed on Roshar in that time? Shallan and Adolin's will be slightly earlier than that--are they celebrating even when apart, or is Shallan working on a completely different calendar by now? Navani reflecting on most of ten years without Dalinar? The other couples, presumably having somewhat more mundane times to celebrate in?
• Proposal - Post-canon
  • I imagine Masha is the one who proposes to Szeth and it takes a while for him to be convinced "this is real, she doesn't see me as the Assassin in White, she knows who I am and loves me exactly as I am." But anything about how they got together!
• Marrying for Love - Getting Married After Having Been Together For Many Years
• Proposal - "We Could Be Dead Tomorrow So Let's Get Married Today"
  • Something finally convinced Palona and Sebarial that they should make it official. Is Sebarial just worried about the class difference, and all the other social changes convinced him it wasn't a big deal? Did they just want a really great wedding night before the battle of champions? What happened?
• Wedding - First Legal Marriage Of Its Kind
• Political Marriage - Emergency Same-Sex Marriage Exception to Avert Imminent War
  • We know that Alethkar/Urithiru has some form of same-sex marriage (Drehy and his husband), but maybe the idea of same-sex marriages (or formal long-term relationships in general?) is new to the listeners. Either way, Renarin/Rlain are going to get a lot of questions from both cultures. What happens then? 
• Wedding Ceremony - Watching A Friend/Family Member Get Married
  • Especially for Adolin/Shallan, there's so much going on there. How are Shallan's brothers feeling? Do they recognize Chanarach? What's going on with her? Adolin chose to wore Kaladin's gift sword among the dozens other gift swords he had--what's with that?
• Established Marriage - Slice Of Married Life During Wartime
  • Lunamor and Tuaka have six kids--what's it like for her when she's waiting for news? Hesina and Lirin worried about their boys? Learning that they're going to have another baby and dealing with that shock during everything else that's going on? Being doctors at Urithiru?
• Newlyweds - Helping New Spouse Settle Into Their New Clan/Village/City/Country
  • Hesina isn't originally from Hearthstone--what was the culture shock like for her? Where do Renarin and Rlain wind up geographically and what adjustments do they have to make?
• Established Marriage - Expectant Couple Prepares for Baby
  • What are the pregnancy traditions for Horneaters? Hesina and Lirin, either earlier in their marriage with Kaladin and Tien, or later with Oroden?

Again, don't feel limited to these specific prompts, anything involving these characters and tropes will be great. Thank you for creating for me!

The rec for this book described it as divided into four sections for four women POV characters--a soldier, a scholar, a poet, and a socialite--and their perspectives on a war/rebellion, with effective worldbuilding, beautiful prose, and increasing intensity as each POV gives different perspectives on the same events. Okay, sold!

This is set in the same universe as Samatar's "A Stranger in Olondria." I have not read that one. It's possible I might have gotten more out of this if I had, however, there are plenty of reviews saying this one works as a standalone, so I'm reviewing it as a standalone.

Premise: Olondria is an on-again, off-again empire, built from three closely-related peoples--the Laths, Nain, and Kestenya. The Laths consider themselves favored of the gods (unfortunately, one of the side effects of divine intervention is creepy vampires), and try to conquer/ally with the other two. Their default line of succession is from the king to his sister's son, and only to the king's son if he has no nephews of his own, which allows for neat political dynamics (Arthuriana vibes, nice!) The feredhai are nomadic people from Kestenya, who resent the concept of land ownership and other border controls imposed by authorities with written rules. A couple generations ago, one of the rebellious Kestenya leaders grew too horrified at the Laths' slaughter of civilians, and betrayed his allies to seek a peaceful resolution to the war. In return, he was granted the Lath princess' hand in marriage, and the new royal family is a blend of Laths, Kestenya, and Nain families, with a pair of sisters marrying a pair of brothers to create a double cousin dynamic. Meanwhile, a new ascetic religious movement, the "Cult of the Stone," has emerged and gained influence among the ruling elite; the devotees try to translate inscriptions off an ancient stone, and put them together to build a scripture focused around the value of reading and writing while avoiding sensual pleasures or wealth, while ignoring any texts that don't seem to fit the austere tone.

Prince Dasya is the heir to the throne; Siski and Tavis (aka Tav) are his cousins. Tav dresses up in boys' clothes to join the army and fight against the Brogyars, but becomes disillusioned with war and empire, and later falls in love with Seren, a feredhai poet. Tav and Dasya plot to start a revolution to bring down the Olondrian empire and the Cult of the Stone and win independence for Kestenya. Results are mixed.

What I just summarized is much more straightforward and linear than the way the book is actually presented. Each section is highly nonlinear in a kind of free association way: one character smells or sees or hears something that evokes of her past, and it abruptly jumps around between timeframes. There's a lot of descriptive prose, but to me, it felt more like "throwing a lot of words at the wall and seeing what sticks." Sentence fragments. Like this. No verbs. Or run-on sentences that talk about this war and then the war two generations ago and then the war described by In-Universe Scholar in her epic poem, "War Is Hell," and then a vague reminder there are vampires but that's probably not very important. I like in-universe documentation when it's done well, but here it didn't feel like it was adding much, just a vibe-based barrage of names.

I'm semi-randomly going to quote a representative example from each of the four sections:


In describing feredhai music, Seren notes that "You will have noticed that all the great songs are sad." Nobody in this book spends a lot of time being happy, and while I understand that war is hell, when it's just unrelenting misery it makes it difficult to care! Tav's sympathetic backstory is "my terrible aunt threw my book of women soldiers in the fire." Tialon makes up a trauma-porn backstory for her father, then admits it's a total fabrication because he never told her anything about himself. Seren loves Tav...except that her people are warriors who die while Tav's people are spoiled sellouts, because empire is terrible and destroys everything it touches. Maybe we're supposed to believe they can change the narrative, but I'm not confident! And Siski has nothing else to live for, so she might as well die with her cousin, except maybe she's not actually going to die, maybe it's a new beginning. Maybe. Imagine. Perhaps. Ambiguity. All vibes. The loose ends that "Tigana" left unresolved were frustrating; "Winged Histories"' weren't, because I didn't really care in the first place.

Bingo: Hidden Gem, Down with the System, Book In Parts, was a previous Readalong, Author of Color, Small Press, LGBTQIA protagonist.