Duck: Dear, dear listener, welcome back to Analysis Roulette. We have got a real treat today because today, today we are analyzing TikTok phenomenon Lightlark according to the psychoanalytic methods of Siegman Freud.
Dia: It's going to be so good.
Duck: An analysis is sure as heck going to be performed.
Dia: We have literally already decided we need a bonus episode for this one so stick around for that.
Duck: Yes, we are going to do this, here is our plan and you are so welcome to join us for this, our plan is to perform a good-faith analysis of this text according to this analytical method, that's the regular episode, we're recording that first, then we're going to go and make a cup of tea, then we're going to come back and we're just going to yell into our microphones for like an hour.
Dia: Because listeners this book is everything.
Duck: There is so much to be said that we cannot say through the limiting framework of…
Dia: The podcast we have chosen to do.
Duck: The podcast we have chosen to perform and we need to share our many many feelings with the universe.
Dia: I am very excited. I'm in my little tent, I've got my favourite mug, and I'm about to be regaled.
Duck: Yeah, I, the Autumn is upon us so I am recording, I am recording this podcast with a hot water bottle on my feet, as is tradition.
Dia: I will say this is the first time that I have not been uncomfortably warm in my little, little podcasting tent.
Duck: It’s, it's a good sign I think. I think it's a good omen.
Dia: And I have my biggest favourite mug which is a very nice one with little um star and moon designs on it which is very appropriate.
Duck: Appropriate, yes. Thematic.
Dia: Between this and the Yu-Gi-Oh jewelry I feel like I'm doing it on purpose and I'm genuinely not.
Duck: To be fair, stars and moons, pretty common motif.
Dia: Yeah, especially in my house.
Duck: Right, but also in general it's not hard to find stars and moons as a motif.
Dia: No.
Duck: In stuff in general, people like stars people and moons.
Dia: My podcasting tent is already made of like, trailing silver ivy print fabric so it's very atmospheric in here.
Duck: Isla would be proud of you.
Dia: I'm so cozy and curled up and surrounded by things that remind me of this book.
Duck: Who could ask for more, really?
Dia: And I'm about to be told a story.
Duck: I'm gonna try. [Laughter] So we should introduce ourselves just before we uh really get started. My name is Duck, I use he/they pronouns.
Dia: My name is Dia, I use they/them pronouns and this is Analysis Roulette.
Duck: This is Analysis Roulette and we, we rolled high. We really did.
Dia: The numbers were in your favour.
Duck: So TikTok sensation Lightlark. This is a novel, I think we could agree on that.
Dia: It sure is.
Duck: Sure is a book. It's by Alex Aster who I think is Ari?
Dia: Ah, no, sorry?
Duck: Their TikTok name.
Dia: Oh, yes, Ari Aster. I think.
Duck: Ari Aster, who is Alex Aster on the cover of the book.
Dia: Also a pen name, confusingly.
Duck: That, that sort of makes sense actually. It's, it markets itself as a kind of Dark Fantasy Hunger Games.
Dia: Well, the marketing is something we can get into later.
Duck: Right, we're going to talk about that in more detail in in in the bonus episode.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: But there is some resemblance in the basic premise after that it diverges a bit I would say, because the actual premise of Lightlark-- okay so just to set out some terms of reference here with Yu-Gi-Oh and some other stuff we've decided to, in summarising, sort of give you the listener the answers rather than the information in the order it is revealed in the plot.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: We're going to do that here because otherwise we will be here for a year.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So much happens in this book.
Dia: So many things happen that are not connected to the things happening on either side of them.
Duck: A lot of stuff happens, um a lot of stuff happens in the last three chapters especially.
Dia: So much.
Duck: We’re actually going to start with, with if you are concerned about spoilers for TikTok sensation Lightlark, please go and read it now, come back when you're done, I am going to spoil everything immediately.
Dia: I will say I went into this book having been thoroughly spoiled because I witnessed some Tik Tok drama we'll probably get into later-- despite not being on Tik Tok I have people who send me Tik Toks that they know I'll hate.
Duck: Your Tik Tok correspondents.
Dia: I was thoroughly spoiled for the ending of this book and yet was surprised by every single plot development that happened so…
Duck: There are--
Dia: If you're worried about spoilers, don't be, it won't--
Duck: There are so many, so many surprises in this.
Dia: You will be surprised regardless.
Duck: You will, you will experience the emotion of surprise.
Dia: But even if we did in fact give you just a linear step-by-step telling of everything that happens in this book I think you would still be surprised when you read it.
Duck: Quite likely, but also we would be here for longer than it takes to read the book.
Dia: We would. So. Lightlark.
Duck: Long ago the Six Nations lived in harmony.
Dia: No, they didn't.
Duck: Well, they lived together.
[Dia giggles]
Duck: Yeah, long ago there were six nations, they were not a rugby tournament. Some shit went down.
Dia: Some drama.
Dia: And the world, basically, as in the island of Lightlark, uh, got sliced up like a pie and most of the people stopped living on the island and went off to live in further flung areas of the world according to their faction, and also they were all horribly cursed.
Dia: Well.
Duck: To varying degrees horrible and curse.
Dia: Yeah, the word curse…
Duck: Remember the curses, they will be important.
Dia: And yet they won't.
Duck: I mean the specifics of curses will not matter at all but the fact of the curses will be important
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Every hundred years the rulers of these Six Nations get together to try to break the curses.
Dia: I so wish it was called the Six Nations tournament.
Duck: It would have been amazing.
Dia: [gasps] Okay, I can, I can handle this.
Duck: It's actually called the Centennial. Which is a much worse name, but that's boring.
Dia: It still sounds like a sports championship, to be honest.
Duck: It-- true, true, and it, it sort of is.
Dia: Yeah…
Duck: The Centennial happens every hundred years when, for convenience’s sake, some portals open from the central island of Lightlark to all of the various regions and all the rulers meet up and spend a 100 days trying to break the curse. There is an elaborate system of rules and timings and events for them to compete in curse breaking because there is, there's, there is an agreement that, that you know, whoever wins gets their curse broken. and gets to choose what curse gets broken although it is never clear what reason any of them have for believing that they can just break one curse.
Dia: This has never happened.
Duck: Right, no one has ever broken one of these curses this is this is all happening for the first time.
Dia: Despite this being I think the sixth Centennial?
Duck: Fifth?
Dia: Fifth, Sixth, something like that.
Duck: Fifth or sixth. It's fascinating to me how, how often we are told that the rules of the Centennial have changed over time because given the number of centennials there's been, five or six are both small numbers, that just means it's different every time?
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: These, these highly formalized and traditional rules that everyone has to abide by.
Dia: Yeah and it's it's quite unclear who is changing the rules as well.
Duck: It is unclear who is changing the rules who is enforcing the rules by what means but nonetheless…
Dia: To be honest, I'm not entirely clear on what the point of it is. I know the, I know what the winner gets as a prize but I'm not quite sure what the aim is.
Duck: Yeah we're just going to have to accept so, so, we're going to talk about more of that stuff in the bonus after this
Dia: Yes.
Duck: For now, we're just going to accept the things this book says about its own setting as true even if not necessarily in ways we understand yes so we will take it as true that the Centennial happens, um the rulers of the Nations because they're all monarchies even the one that's a parliamentary, constitutional monarchy is a monarchy.
Dia: Yeah. God, imagine if you were a prime minister or something in this universe.
Duck: I would read an entire series.
Dia: Just like yeah so when are you going to be back from your magic Hunger Games? Because we have to review just like some tax stuff?
Duck: Look it's either going to be four months or I'm going to die, those are the options. There is a prophecy, they are doing all of this because there is a prophecy. The prophecy is not especially poetic as prophecies go which I sort of respect actually uh but it basically says if you reenact the conditions that led to the curse you can break the curses and this involves somebody dying one of your rulers one of these rulers must die as part of the reenactment because when the curses were formed all the rulers died trying to mitigate it break it is unclear what, what people, at least I didn't fully understand what people think the rulers like, did the first time round but they all died trying to be not cursed.
Dia: We do find out that whatever they think, they're wrong so it isn't super important.
Duck: Don't worry too much about what it is is because they are mistaken. Um should I just tell this backwards in a way to make it make sense I think I'm going to just fully tell it backwards.
Dia: It can't make less sense than telling it forwards.
Duck: Okay, so trying to tell it backwards what actually happened. Oh no, first we, there's an important piece of information here which we have not named the factions and for any of this to.
Dia: Right yes of course.
Duck: Of course we must name-
Dia: It's a YA novel, you must name the factions.
Duck: Right in in this sense it is in fact a Hunger Games because you know it's got factions and it's got a murder Olympics which is structurally pretty close.
Dia: A murder Olympics where the murder does seem to be somewhat optional.
Duck: Right, which is very unlike the Hunger Games, where the murder is absolutely not optional. But we'll do Hunger Games. I don't actually remember if it's in the list but I cannot imagine that we missed it out if.
Dia: If it's not it will be eventually.
Duck: If it's not we could put it in in replacement for Lightlark.
Dia: I'm sorry you think I'm letting you take Lightlark out of the list?
Duck: Damn it. The factions, which are not dystopia factions like the reason there are factions is not because everything broke 500 years ago and we formed into factions to survive it, oh no no no no no, these are like biological segments of humanity.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: They have magic powers based on which faction they are in and they are sunlings, moonlings, starlings, skylings, wildlings and nightshades.
Dia: I love that the nightshades have a different name to make sure you know they’re different.
Duck: It can't be nightlings or darklings because that would be not goth.
Dia: I mean darkling would probably be copyright infringement and nightling does sound like a discount superhero so I understand, but it is funny.
Duck: It, it is funny how little they match, yes.
Dia: Yeah, we also only ever meet one of them.
Duck: Yeah, to the point where I fully thought that there was going to be a big twist about all the nightshades except for their King being dead, that did not happen.
Dia: There are lots of twists that feel like they're being telegraphed, that do not happen.
Duck: But there are lots of other twists that that fully happen. A lot.
Dia: Oh yeah, there are also twists but there are twists that you really think are going to happen that do not.
Duck: I really, I really thought that that one of the things was going to be, well obviously the faction we destroy in order to free the other factions of the curse is going to be Nightshade because it is just him he's the only one there is left so we can just kill him. That was not where it went.
Dia: I will say, like, I did, I want to pitch this in early, there are things to like about this book. And one of the things I found a lot of reviewers who liked the book saying is that it was unpredictable I will give it that.
Duck: Absolutely it is. [stuttering] I will be the first to admit I don't understand what happened in this book, I'm… part of the reason I'm struggling to summarise it is I don't fully follow the events of especially the last three chapters.
Dia: But if you're looking for an unpredictable read and that's like the thing you like in books this will do you.
Duck: Right, if what you're looking for is surprise, boy do I have a book for you.
Dia: And like, I did go through a lot of positive reviews and a lot of them saying this was so unpredictable, I didn't see a thing coming, I was like you know what I see why you liked it.
Duck: Me too.
Dia: You are correct, I can't argue.
Duck: Me too, I saw none of this coming. Long ago, like 500 years, like quite specifically 500 years, the queen of the starlings whose name is Aurora had an elaborate romantic friendship falling out with the other rulers involving her best friend who was Queen of the wildlings.
Dia: Ran off with her fiance.
Duck: Running off with her fiance who was king of the sunlings.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Yeah so she murdered them, understandably, um but she wasn't very good at murdering them, she accid-- well she, she she murdered them with the use of a powerful magical artefact she did not fully understand and therefore cursed everyone forever.
Dia: And those are the curses of these Six Nations.
Duck: Those are the curses, that, that's why they're cursed.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Because of this sort of accidental…
Dia: Woman scorned doesn't know how to handle weapon, destroys world.
Duck: Destroys world, which again as premises go is solid.
Dia: I legit love the premise of this, yeah, I think it's really fun.
Duck: Yeah, so the prophecy says that to break the curses you must reenact the original crime.
Dia: And the prophecy they got, all of the other contemporary rulers sacrifice themselves to make there be a prophecy which is why there is a prophecy.
Duck: Thank you that, that yeah that bit had not stuck in my brain, which is why there is a prophecy but it also means that only the queen of the starlings who is Immortal knows what really happened so she's the only one who is in a position to uh manipulate events into reenacting the appropriate things because she's the only one who knows what those things were.
Dia: Yes, they are all Immortal, the others were around, they were just not involved.
Duck: Right the others are all immortal except for our heroine who is Queen of the wildlings.
Dia: I think she is immortal it's just not relevant because she's like 20.
Duck: That's possibly true she's, she, yes, I don't, I don't know if we know that she's mortal although I think she's sort of expecting to die at some point. Uh, in the natural way of things, I mean, she absolutely is expecting to be murdered.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Which is a reasonable expectation under the circumstances. Anyway she's very unusual because-- we should talk about the curses. None of this makes sense without the curses and yet the curses are almost wholly irrelevant.
Dia: The curses are so good.
Duck: We will… so sunlings, they can't go out in the daytime anymore.
Dia: Their power obviously comes from the sun, making this more inconvenient than it would already have been.
Duck: Right, although I do feel as curses go it is not the most serious.
Dia: They're very gender split in terms of how much they're going to destroy your world.
Duck: Right, the men have comparatively easy curses because the nightshades, in a beautiful match to the sunlings, can't go out at night.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And also their power comes from darkness. Although I maintain you can make Darkness quite easily indoors.
Dia: It's easier to make Darkness indoors than it is to make sunlight indoors.
Duck: By a considerable distance, yes. Which is possibly where everyone is still afraid of them, like, as a military force because everyone thinks--
Dia: Yeah, like--
Duck: Because we have to emphasise here that the night-aligned faction are also the ones everyone agrees are naturally wicked.
Dia: Yes and to be fair, as are the hero’s faction.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: Just in a different, sexier way.
Duck: But in a much sexier way.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Because for wildlings which is our hero’s faction, they have a two-fold curse. Uh the first is that they must kill, they are required to kill anyone who falls in love with them.
Dia: That they fall in love with, I think.
Duck: Yes, probably. Well, they put a lot of effort into like, temptation and seduction for people who have to do the falling in love themselves.
Dia: [noise of disagreement]
Duck: And also they have a diet exclusively of human hearts.
Dia: Yes, one a month, which has somehow not destroyed the entire world.
Duck: Right, somehow this has not caused a depopulation crisis.
Dia: We're told that they eat the hearts of jewel thieves who come into their land because one of their powers is making there be gemstones, which implies an unhinged jewel economy in this universe that I'm not going to get into.
Duck: Gemstones simultaneously spring up from the ground like moss and are so valuable that it is worth getting your heart eaten to go and pick them up.
Dia: Sure, makes sense.
Duck: Don't think about it too hard, don't think about the numbers. So the wildlings as a consequence of these curses are extremely sexy ladies and fighters, that obviously is where that goes.
Dia: And everyone is scared of them because they are… heart eating seductresses I think is the phrase used near constantly
Duck: Multiple times, the heart eating seductress line.
Dia: Which to be fair, fucks.
[Duck laughs]
Dia: I would I would buy merch saying heart eating seductress.
Duck: I mean, yeah.
Dia: Is there Lightlark merch?
Duck: As a culture they've really leaned into this reputation, they wear the very tight dresses. We don't get detailed descriptions of clothes, but most of the time I imagine that the very tight dresses is like, it's the kind where you've got the full skirt and then the the bodice is just those like two strips up over the the the nipples.
Dia: And apparently everyone in this universe wears modesty capes um except the wildlings have see-through ones.
Duck: I love the see-through modesty capes. I also love that no one else is wearing the capes.
Dia: No, Cleo is wearing a cape at one point and we're told that nothing is visible beyond the cape.
Duck: Right, she's wearing like an actually, actually modest cape.
Dia: I think Azul has a cape at one point because the only way we're told that he's black is that his cape is touching his dark shoulders.
Duck: Right so Azul, we should mention.
Dia: Exists.
Duck: I have to warn you, I have to warn you listener, we are going to discuss Azul more than the book does.
Dia: Yeah, I think we already have.
Duck: Azul is king of the skylings.
Dia: Uh whose curse is that they can't fly.
Duck: Their curse is that they cannot fly.
Dia: Which they could previously.
Duck: We are not missing anything there, their curs is: they cannot fly.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: They are deeply cursed. He's very sad because his husband died at some point this is all there is to say about Azul.
Dia: He successfully poisons the villain of the book after working out her evil plan and then tells no one.
Duck: Right! He plays a vital plot role off screen which he reveals to No One thus enabling her to be freed so this action achieves nothing.
Dia: Literally nothing except for to incriminate him because everyone thinks he's poisoned another person for no reason whatsoever!
Duck: Right because she's posing as her own sweet nice innocent, um, descendant.
Dia: Descendant, yes.
Duck: She is to be fair also cursed, we must say.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Cursed. When she blundered and cursed everyone she did also curse herself.
Dia: No, she didn't curse, because, um she didn't receive her usual, her-- she cursed her people, not herself.
Duck: Right, she cursed her people, she, she alone in all the world is not personally cursed.
Dia: Well, and Ila. Isla. Fuck.
Duck: But it doesn't really help because well… the curse on the starlings is, um, the sea comes to get them every full moon.
Dia: That’s the moonlings.
Duck: Sorry, it is the moonlings that's the real curse yeah-- what the, what the fuck do the starlings have?
D:They die at 25.
Duck: [Gleeful] That's the one! That's the one!
Dia: This is what we mean when we say the girl curses are worse.
Duck: The girl curses are worse.
Dia: Isla’s people are cursed to kill anyone they love and have to eat hearts, uh, Cleo who is the bitchy character we find out is bisexual in a throwaway line, um, is cursed, we're repeatedly told that her curse is the easiest one to deal with but her curse is that every full moon the ocean actively hunts down her people to kill them, and then the starling's curse is that everybody drops dead at 25.
Duck: Everybody drops dead at 25, we are repeatedly told, you know, you know the economy is in shambles.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Their their land is in ruins because everyone just drops dead at 25.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Meanwhile the men can't go out in the sun, can't go out at night, and can't fly.
Dia: [spooky voice] The curse!!!!!
Duck: We are extracted by the book to take all of these curses equally seriously as problems.
Dia: Except for Cleo’s.
Duck: Except for Cleo’s, because the moon causing the sea to like to the point where not only do they need to be like not be on boats but the sea like climbs the sides of their island and is busy battering down the palace and at some point they're like, it's totally going to succeed in breaking into that castle and just eating them all it's it's really quite aggressively killing them all.
Dia: But you know what's worse than that?
Duck: Not being able to fly.
Dia: Not being able to fly.
Duck: Also they all wear faction colours, which sounds deeply inconvenient for the moonlings who wear white.
Dia: At all times! Not to mention the starlings all wear light gray and silver at all times.
Duck: Yes they do.
Dia: Which, if you look up the character concept art, these two women look nigh identical.
Duck: They would yeah.
Dia: They also have color coded hair.
Duck: Of course they do.
Dia: Because of course they do.
Duck: Why would they not?
Dia: I love this.
Duck: The wildlings colour code incidentally is all the colours of nature provided she isn't infringing on the colours of the other factions which are like monochrome plus gold plus blue, sky blue. Apart from those colours, she can wear all the colours.
Dia: And silver.
Duck: Yeah that's what, that's in the-- yeah so I always think of monochrome as including all the greys.
Dia: Yeah I'm just flagging silver as separate to gray.
Duck: Yeah so you can't wear white, silver, black, gold, or sky blue, but apart from that, go wild just. I I just want to flag this up because I feel like the wildlings’ curse, very bad but the wildlings’ universe-assigned fashion limitations by far the easiest.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Even if you have to be sexy and seductress.
Dia: Yeah, they do at all times have to be sexy.
Duck: Yeah, they are very sexy lady warriors.
Dia: I don't know if there are male ones, we don't meet them/ I mean I know they exist but we don't meet any.
Duck: No we hear them by reputation. They're heart eating seductresses who um are super good with swords. Just imagine like, Marines like the, the mythical status of the US Marine, but with like skimpy bodices and being sexy ladies who eat hearts.
Dia: Yes and they all love weapons.
Duck: They love weapons so much, all SWAT teams in this universe are made up of heart eating seductresses.
Dia: All of the factions also have a superpower which they had pre-curses that's just like part of their biology, the wildlings’ one is they can make gemstones grow from the ground and control vines and make flowers grow and things like that.
Duck: A bunch of a bunch of plant powers including gemstones popping up from the earth because it's all nature.
Dia: They are all Cordelia Hale from W.I.T.C.H. except brunettes.
Duck: Our heroin Isla has no powers, because she has a personal curse that means she's not cursed.
Dia: Yes. Because we are told of her mother not killing her Father which really questions how anyone gets born in this world.
Duck: Right, her mother didn't kill her father so her father killed her mother just after she was born as a consequence of not having been killed because of like sort of curse vengeance mode.
Dia: How are these people procreating?
Duck: One night stands um but this means that Isla is personally cursed but the nature of her curse is that she doesn't have any wildling powers including the wildling curse so Isla doesn't eat hearts, Isla eats, like, food.
Dia: She eats a tiny slice of heart at one point and spends the entire night throwing up which…
Duck: Look, look, I understand that we are in a melodrama I accept this. But if you are up all night retching blood, I don't care what you ate what you have there is called an upper GI bleed and it's very serious and you should go to hospital.
Dia: I've been a vegetarian for six, seven years now I think I could probably eat one tiny slice of heart without feeling sick, Isla's just a bitch.
Duck: I will, I will accept like one (1) disgust and guilt driven bout of emesis but if you are still throwing up at 3 in the morning and you are throwing up blood that's an upper GI bleed, go to hospital.
Dia: Medical advice.
Duck: Medical emergency is what that is. Anyway, that's not relevant, it never comes up again. [laughing]
Dia: It's not important at all. Oh, no, it gives us a clue about Grim.
Duck: Does it?
Dia: Yeah he um, he's the one who gets her out of having to eat it in public.
Duck: I, I guess that's a clue but only if you regard stop, like socially and publicly tormenting this child as necessarily a clue that he knows what's up with her.
Dia: [giggling] Well, everyone else wants to torment the child.
Duck: Right but I still feel like stop tormenting this child at this dinner party, I don't want to watch her eating a heart, it's gross, is something a person could feel without necessarily being engaged in complex...
Dia: Ah, you’ve forgotten, this is King Grimshaw of the nightshades, we're not supposed to expect him to be nice.
Duck: He is my favourite character.
Dia: Azul is mine but I see you and I understand. I just love Azul's poisoning plot so much.
Duck: The poisoning plot is great, the, the doesn't tell anyone so nobody gets to capitalise on this in any way is particularly good.
Dia: Icon behavior!
Duck: But on the other hand we must accept Grim's shiningest moment of wonderfulness when one of the silly trials--
Dia: The Dragon’s Den bit!
Duck: One of the trials is is Dragon's Den they pack an auditorium and I mean pack the auditorium in the Democracy sense, because they fill the auditorium which is going to vote on them with members of one of the factions, because they're the ones who live there.
Dia: For overseas audiences, um Dragon's Den is the British name for what Americans call Shark Tank, the TV show where you pitch inventions.
Duck: Where you pitch your inventions, and they take turns pitching their inventions to the crowd.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And Isla has an extremely unnecessarily dramatic moment but we won't dwell on it because we're dwelling on King Grim who when it's his turn walks out into the center of the auditorium and says we produce nothing of value and walks off.
Dia: I mean, me at uni.
Duck: Absolutely beautiful I love the, this is stupid and I'm not doing it.
Dia: It's so good.
Duck: Absolutely beautiful.
Dia: Also based on what we find out later he, he is choosing this, he had months to prepare for this, he knew it was coming.
Duck: This was his plan.
Dia: This was his plan, this was a choice.
Duck: Okay, this is supposed to be the serious one before the bonus episode, I have to drag us onto some kind of track.
Dia: Yes, okay, sorry, I cannot contain myself.
Duck: It's so hard, there's so much that we need to-- we're just screaming down microphones.
Dia: Okay, so we we've done the World building.
Duck: We've covered the World building
Dia: The plot.
Duck: The plot is basically two strands. Isla and her friend Celeste who is the Starling Queen, uh who by definition is under 25, so she is described as the second youngest so I think we don't have a specific age for Isa but we know she is younger than Celeste who is under 25. Isla is a baby.
Dia: Yes I think she's implied to be nearing 20ish.
Duck: Yeah, this wouldn't stand out so much if the other rulers were not all 500 years old.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Isla has concocted a plan with Celeste. This plan is she's going to conceal her lack of powers for as long as possible. She's going to appear as middling and mediocre as possible during the first half of the Centennial which is the trials and the displays and the Dragon's Den episode in order to in the second half of the trial. Get paired with Celeste as like the spares.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: They're trying to encourage a pair the spares plan and it's, they’re the spares, so that they can spend their time hunting through Library and um collections of vintage magical artefacts.
Dia: I don't think Isla really had to pretend to be unimpressive.
Duck: She's working so hard to reach the level of-- yeah she's, because of course, she is actually very impressive and keeps accidentally showing off, it's it's a very young adult novel in that
Way.
Dia: It's quite charming, really.
Duck: We will talk about the details in the bonus episode.
Dia: We will.
Duck: They're doing, uh but they're going to spend their time hunting through the libraries and uh armories in search of something called the bond breaker which will be a way to just, um, break their own the curses on their own factions is the theory. While Isla is trying to enact this plan she keeps being obstructed by all the very old men around her falling in love with her.
Dia: Excuse me, except Azul.
Duck: Except for Azul.
Dia: Who is gay and also not present.
Duck: Whois gay, sad, and missing.
Dia: The title of my upcoming indie album. [Laughter] Yes, the men who are not gay, sad, and missing are interrupting Isla's very cunning plan to do very little.
Duck: Yes, well she's she's just trying to survive the contest while actually what she's doing is searching for the bond breaker and she gets caught up instead in the sunling king's plan to find the original powerful magical artefact that was misused to create the curse because he's pretty sure that that's what needs to be be used to break the curses, that that's a vital part of the reenactment so he's hunting for this other magical artefact, and he ropes her into hunting for that. He succeeds, she doesn't, so they have the heart of Lightlark, which is a powerful magical artefact that does powerful magical artefact stuff. Then Celeste comes along and says I found it, we can do the thing. Also people are getting murdered through the book which is putting everyone really on edge. All of this culminates through a series of steps that that certainly followed one on the other although I cannot reconstruct them now in my head in a showdown on the wildling bit of the Lightlark Island, which is all in ruins because no wildlings live there anymore. It actually, there's not a lot of description in most of this book but um what we do get I did find led my imagination to produce some really cool scenes about the wildling ruins because it's like a Glass Castle, it's like I'm imagining like the Crystal Palace surrounded by the wall of thorns from Sleeping Beauty.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Very cool.
Dia: There are, there are some weird descriptive choices but there are a few passages here of really nice description of cool settings.
Duck: Yeah the environments are some of the best described bits I think.
Dia: Yeah, but I will say at one point a city is described as cliffy, which I love because I just kept picturing Clippy.
Duck: Ah, see I was at least imagining Edinburgh.
Dia: I was picturing, I just, when I heard Cliffy my brain just went it's like a little little city that pops up to help you write a letter.
Duck: You seem to be trying to hold a centennial!
Dia: But there's nothing actually wrong with it, it just made me laugh, there are some really lovely descriptions here even if some of them were a little bit weird.
Duck: Yeah there's a showdown so we have all the rulers and two powerful magical artefacts in the Crystal Palace having a showdown a lot of complicated revelations happen one after another.
Dia: Some of which you see coming.
Duck: Some of which you do not.
Dia: Oh my God some of which you do not.
Duck: So what has actually been happening is that Isla has spent the last year falling in love with Grim. She doesn't know this, because her memories have been messed with. So she's been involved in what she thought was a love triangle between her and two old men she'd never met before and actually it was a love triangle between her an old man she'd never met before and an old man she'd been sleeping with for most of the year.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: But her memories have been removed because it was important for the reenactment thing that she should fall in love with the sunling king.
Dia: And also for magic I am evil and want all the powers reasons uh the sunling king and the Nightshade King both had to be in love with Isla.
Duck: Right, because when rulers are in love with someone, that someone gets access to all their powers.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: That just, this is just part of how the metaphysics.
Dia: Except for I think the flares which are superpowers you have on top of your magic Nation Powers.
Duck: Right, which would matter more, which would hit better if we had enough information about any of the powers to be surprised when something turned out to be a flare instead.
Dia: Especially because we're told that Oro, the king of sunling’s, flare is he can tell when people are lying to him which would have been very helpful had Isla spontaneously developed it and the fact that we don't know for sure whether she did or not is quite confusing.
Duck: Yeah, but, but because Isla is cursed to have no wildling powers she therefore has no experience with power and therefore hasn't realised that she in fact has all of the powers except the Starling power um because yeah the two old men are in love with her and then it turns out the bond breaker artefact actually does the reverse.
Dia: It’s actually a bond maker.
Duck: And it lets Celeste, Aurora, steal all her powers which means all of all the powers she will rule as Queen everything with all of the Powers.
Dia: She is the Avatar, yeah.
Duck: Unfortunately for her it goes wrong. I can't, it, I know she gets like dumped in a crack in the Earth-- because of the heart of the thing that's right they've got the other magical artefact.
Dia: Yeah, there's the other magical artefact, the egg one.
Duck: There's a little interlude where Isla teleports home gets dressed up in all her armour with her swords and comes back which very class.
Dia: I love it. I love it when you hit pause on the confrontation with the villain.
Duck: Pause this whole showdown I'm going home to get dressed.
Dia: What do you think they talked about? Like she just left the guys there.
Duck: Just, just leaves them there to die as far as they know.
Dia: Do you think the guys talked to Aurora while she was off changing into her armour? Alex Aster if you're listening, if you're listening please can you include that as a flashback in the sequel? I will do anything.
Duck: We would like this bonus scene.
Dia: Did they just make awkward small talk? They know each other!
Duck: They've known each other for centuries!
Dia: She was engaged to Oro's brother! She had a fling with Grim!
Duck: Right, there are so many romantic entanglements here. It is relevant to my analysis that you understand listener that there are so many romantic entanglements here.
Dia: Except for for the queer people who both have tragic pasts but no current romantic entanglements.
Duck: The current romantic entanglements, um--
Dia: Gay things can only happen in the past and you have to be sad about it. Heterosexual nonsense, however, continues for 500 years.
Duck: Mmhm so if you want to opt out of heterosexual nonsense, if you want to opt out of, you know, webs of betrayal, be gay.
Dia: Be gay and you can just be sad and ineffective in the distance instead.
Duck: But poison someone really effectively and then tell no one.
Dia: Yeah he's very effective it's more he's not communicative about his effectiveness.
Duck: If this was a good plot, he would have told someone, someone, something that would enable them to in any way take advantage of this situation instead of just appearing to be in league with a serial killer.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: We have now discussed Azul more than the book did.
Dia: Yes we've gotten at least four sentences in.
Duck: Right, we have discussed his motivations, a thing the book does not do.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Anyway it does tell us that he's gay and sad.
Dia: It also briefly tells us that he's black, or at least that he has dark shoulders.
Duck: I mean sufficiently briefly that I did not notice that.
Dia: Yeah, I didn't-- I only noticed because I had seen the character art.
Duck: Yeah, I was not aware. I did get that he was gay and sad that part was communicated to me. And wearing blue.
Dia: He is gay sad and wearing blue.
Duck: The follow-up album. There is a web of betrayals as the, the as everything comes out that Celeste is really Aurora, and Aurora really created the curses, because her sister and best friend, same person, uh was having an affair with her fiance which was Oro's ancestor, the sunling king.
Dia: I think his brother.
Duck: Sorry, yes, he was brother I'm too used to thinking in terms of progeniture in terms of kingship. Um, but the important bit is that the starling’s best friend is having a romantic
relationship with the sunling king and then one of the best friends murders the other, that's how the curses got created and Isla, like works this out, uses the bond breaker magic artefact to
reverse the power stealing, so now she has all the powers and Aurora has no powers and then that means that one of the best friends has killed the other one and the romantic relationships are all in place so that counts as reenactment so they get to break the curse.
Dia: Yeah, it's not super stated that that's what happened to the extent that I wasn't sure if that was what happened or if that had been subverted like it genuinely could be either because it could also just be that Isla got the magical artefact that isn't the bondmaker, bondbreaker situation uh through more legitimate me means than Aurora originally did so she might just have better control of it and more ability to end curses with it.
Duck: Yeah she actually helped hunt it down and, and like found it.
Dia: She's the one who figured out where it was, whereas Aurora got Grim to do it.
Duck: Got Grim to do it and then just like, I don't think she stole it but she got him to give it her.
Dia: Uh I think she seduced him didn't she?
Duck: Probably, there's a lot of that going around.
Dia: And said, I want an all powerful magic artefact, boyfriend.
Duck: Part of the reason we're having difficulty summarising this is that this is about as long as it takes in the book as well.
Dia: Yeah it all happens really fast.
Duck: It all happens in like, three pages that everything comes out and most of it doesn't really tie into the events of the book which again are mostly spent on Magic Dragon's Den and breaking into libraries and going on hikes.
Dia: Running around in disguises.
Duck: We have more, more time is spent on searching flowers for Magical artefacts than is spent on these reveals.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: And the Magical artefact isn't even in the flowers.
Dia: No, it's an egg.
Duck: It's an egg.
Dia: Like the moon.
Duck: And the sun.
Dia: We're not going to spend too much time on the egg.
Duck: But we will return to the egg in the bonus episode.
Dia: [faintly] Like the moon, which is an egg.
Duck: I mean I also have watched Doctor Who.
Dia: God I'm gonna die.
Duck: The moon is an egg.
Dia: Okay, well that's… and then we get to the end of the plot which is our love triangle will be revisited in a future instalment.
Duck: I apologise that it has taken us 40 minutes to do this it's because this plot is massively convoluted.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Like I am genuinely doing my best here, I just don't understand what happened in this book.
Dia: I'm not helping I'm heckling.
Duck: This is also true and has been a hindrance, well done. For your punishment, please
explain to us Freudian psychoanalysis.
Dia: So, uh, you might need to interrupt me because we did agree on a definition of psychoanalysis [stumbles] psychoanalysis.
Duck: We're sort of working on the psychoanalysis minus the whole Oedipus thing.
Dia: Yes, so we've separated psychoanalytical readings into Freudian and psychoanalytical (other). So, my understanding is that the other category comes essentially from the psychological theory that psychosis, symptoms of mental unrest, are caused by sort of these latent problems in the unconscious mind, um, which might be sort of unresolved issues that you developed as a child, traumas you've repressed, things like that, and the idea that Freud had was that you could cure people by making these unconscious things conscious and
delving into them and understanding yourself.
Duck: Yes.
Dia: On a literary level the understanding is that these unconscious traumas, strangenesses, things that don't sit right with us that we're not consciously aware of are exposed in our writing, they sort of leech out into the prose.
Duck: Yeah. This is this is why you will get sort of reviews landing what often fairly cheap
blows about you know ah this this author has Daddy problems.
Dia: Yeah and it can also, it can be sexual, but it can also be like hey is it me or does JRR Tolkien have a bit of a thing about spiders.
Duck: Right.
Dia: Which he maintained he didn't for his entire life, but we do know that he was in a very frightening incident with a large spider as a child and that there are lots of scary spiders in his writings.
Duck: Right, exactly we we know that he has more than once, unconnected in in any kind of sequence of events, more than one once his heroes face being attacked by giant spiders and wrapped up and left for dead.
Dia: Yeah, and it can be a positive as well like I, um, like a sort of recurring joke about Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson etc books is that most of the women described as having affairs with gods have some kind of like mystical connection to that god, whether it's because they like had, they are in a line of work or they have a passion that appeals to that god, except for the woman who is based on Rick Riordan's wife who is just super cool and the gods like her. That's sort of the nice side of psychoanalytical reading.
Duck: That’s so wholesome.
Dia: It's so cute, everyone who meets her in the books is just like, gods, Poseidon was right she is the best.
Duck: She's just great.
Dia: There are three things, the three sexiest things in the world to Rick Riorden are being super passionate, being super talented, and being my wife. And that's so valid. But like that's
kind of the nice side of it, is things that are really good and positive within you can leak out without you consciously putting them in to what you write.
Duck: Yes, and the other thing to to bring in in on the more sort of psychotherapy side, uh, is this concept of sort of projection.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Which is one of the terms that's made it into pop psychology but in this case in a way that is not far off from what I can make out. What Freud was thinking with it, uh, which is that you have our internal feelings and rather than be aware of your feelings, you project them and you see
them as feelings someone else is having. So the you the the sort of therapeutic classic one, because a lot of this is really focused around the, for Freud it is really focused around sort of therapeutic relationship, he's not normally thinking about regular human relationships he's either thinking about the relationship between a person and their therapist or a child and their parents those are the two relationships he's mostly examining, but the sort of classic, simple enough to be classic but actually not necessarily oversimplified, this is actually kind of the theory, is you are engaged in talking therapy with your therapist and you feel that your therapist is disgusted with you or angry with you yeah this is because that is what you're feeling about yourself but instead of being aware of it as an internal feeling you interpret it as a thing your therapist is feeling.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: So a projection is understanding your internal stuff as happening externally in other people.
Dia: Yeah I am ashamed of my phobia of fish, therefore I assume that my therapist to whom I'm opening up is judging me for my phobia of fish.
Duck: Exactly.
Dia: I assume everyone's judging me for my phobia of fish it's just a very silly phobia.
Duck: I don't judge you for your phobia of fish.
Dia: You should.
Duck: I'm deathly terrified of wasps, who are approximately 100th, one 100,000th my size.
Dia: We've all got them.
Duck: Right, everyone's got stupid fears. The human condition is to have stupid fears about stuff.
Dia: Which is to be fair a lot of psychoanalysis.
Duck: It, it is, we are not talking about the sexual stuff in psychoanalysis. Freud had a lot to say.
Dia: Yes, we've put that in a separate category.
Duck: That is a separate category. We will at some point roll for a Freudian analysis, and at that point we will discuss Freud's theory that literally all of human culture, all art, all science, all
relationships, all architecture comes down to wanting to fuck your mother. [Stuttering] He had a lot to say, he had a lot to say and it took him something like 40 years of professional work to consider that people might do things for reasons that were not fundamentally about sex.
Dia: I mean I get it. You come on to one good idea and you're like I've got to milk this for everything it's worth.
Duck: I'm not sure I would describe it as a good idea but we will discuss this in more detail when when we roll that.
Dia: This week, however, we've rolled other psychoanalysis.
Duck: Other, so we're going to look at at this sort of projection stuff and this um, this idea that what you're really thinking comes out in your work. Although mostly I have, I have sort of stuck to within the text here I've not tried to analyse Alex Aster based on this this book.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: I have mostly tried to analyse this book based on this book, which is already a challenge there's there's so much of this book.
Dia: Yeah, for not a long book it has a lot of book in it.
Duck: Exactly, it's very, it's very dense, very compressed text.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: I'm not going to sort of go into too much sort of elaborate description of individual events, partly because as I said I do not fully understand most of the events of this book this is probably a flaw in me.
Dia: A lot happens very quickly.
Duck: I amd instead going to jump straight in with my thesis statement rather than work up to it, which I realise is backwards in terms of essay form.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: That's what I'm going to do so here is my thesis: nobody in this book is relating to each other, they are all reenacting the stories that they've been told about the curses being formed. All of this, everything that happens in Lightlark is psychodrama. So this is, this is all recapitulation of the stories they've been told, and that they've told themselves about what happened and what it meant. Grim is being evil, Grim is like choosing to be a villain because being evil is how he can make sense of things. it's, he's making his choices according to the rubric of I'm going to be evil as a way of of his ego making terms, coming to terms with his id. So this is another Freudian thing is you have the the superego the ego, and the id. The id is like. your drives and desires and the ego is the part of you that makes rational decisions, and you get to, you get into a lot of difficulty trying to mediate between sort of reality and rationality on the ego side and inherent Instinct and drive on the id side, and how Grim is doing it is: I'm a be a villain. I'm going to enact that role.
Dia: Sure.
Duck: Aurora is projecting literally her own memory, like just the story of her old friends onto these
people and Aurora is really stuck in a rut here because she's been doing this over and over again for centuries. She's never especially I think had this particular plan but she has been for centuries thinking of and feeling about these people as if they were her old friends who she either killed or watched die as they tried to like alleviate the problems she has caused
and meanwhile Isla, who is ignorant of a lot of what really happened, but what
she's acting out in a very directly Freudian, you know, coming to adulthood way she is acting out a conflict between who her parents want her to be, meaning here her Guardians, the people who actually raised her, because the people who raised her have a whole plan about
how she is supposed to be a seductress and she is supposed to go out and seduce
one of these other rulers and that's going to be the means by which their whole realm is protected but that's who she's got to be, she's acting out the conflict between that and who she's trying to form herself into in defiance of that, and what it does in the end is all circle back to being who they wanted but in a more complicated way. She spends most of this book rebelling against the you have to go and be a seductress pressure.
Dia: Whilst accidentally wearing her sluttiest dress to dinner.
Duck: Including things of this nature, um, and the net result of it is she succeeds in the seduction that she was trying not to try to do.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Which is very very Freudian, actually, it's very Oedipus that that kind of coming back to the beginning in a more complicated way as a resolution to the the problem of growing up and being, and coming to terms with the sort of story your parents are giving you and the, the human universal that you are acting out it's, yeah. Isla is basically always making her decisions based on what do my parents (people who raised me) want me to do, how can I rebel against that, that's what I'm going to do. What I am saying is that none of these decisions make sense.
Dia: No, that is a notable trait of Isla.
Duck: The plot itself is a sequence of of events that happen one after another and some of them seem to to follow and some of them less so, but I think the decisions of the characters basically never make sense, they're never-- it's not just that they're bad decisions, it's that they're
decisions that have nothing to do with the material facts that they are facing, which is because none of them are acting in response to anything around them. These people are re-acting and reenacting these internalised stories so they are only aware of the shape of the myth they are either trying to act out or trying to rebel against. They're not, the material details are not even present in their decision-making.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Isla is never looking at the the situation in front of her and deciding what to do about it, she is always choosing between the story her parents gave her and the story that she has written together with Celeste.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: Unfortunately, neither of these stories is happening but she doesn't know this because she doesn't stop-- not, not, not meaning in a judgy way, she doesn't stop to look, but her awareness never escapes from the bounds of these two stories and that I think is very, yeah it's psychodrama. That, that's my thesis, is that everyone in this book is doing this same thing. Everyone is acting out a myth or reenacting a memory and the places where those things contradict are kind of where the plot finds Its room to happen but at no point are the people in
this book making deliberate choices that drive the plot they are always acting out of their internal drives including a lot of assumptions they're making about other people based on casting them within that psychodrama. Does this sound right, or at least plausible as a reading?
Dia: Yeah, I mean it's hard to say because like so much of the inner workings of the characters in this book is explained after the fact.
Duck: Yes, I feel like--
Dia: In way that do not connect to their behaviour as human people.
Duck: Yeah, I feel simultaneously like I should have made a detailed diagram of what actually is happening and then gone back and reread with that in the other hand. And that this wouldn't really have helped. Because the decisions people make don't really relate to what's really happening any more than they relate to what Isa thinks is happening.
Dia: Yeah I mean, like I said, I went in very spoiled for this book, I knew what was happening with it from the beginning and the weirdest thing about that is that it didn't make it make any more sense.
Duck: Yeah so you know, Grim and Aurora are the people who actually know what's going on for most of this book, but the decisions Grim makes don't, half the time do not seem to be in furtherance of his supposed goals.
Dia: I mean, what are his goals. What do they mean. They don't--
Duck: Well, this is my argument, is that his actual goal, regardless of the specifics of the plot that they've cooked up, his actual goal is be villainous.
Dia: Yes, this is true.
Duck: What do villains do? Well, they seduce young ladies and they make mysterious comments and weird threats and they look spooky and they do not participate in team building events.
Dia: Grim has opted out of the workplace corporate team building training.
Duck: He has, and I appreciate that about him. It's interesting because I think I agree with you and one of the things that really struck me about this is, I'm not going to get into, we're going to get into in the bonus episode all of the things we think could have improved this reading experience for us I imagine, um, but there are things, there are things I really, really, like and quite a lot of the things I really liked are things that do seem to be implied and just aren't really explored and one of those is the deal with Aurora, which is Aurora seems to think it is just a given naturally that if Oro and Isla spend any amount of time near each other, Oro will fall head over heels in love with her.
Duck: Yes, absolutely.
Dia: And I think in text it's sort of implied that this is partly just because Isla is a super hot wildling seductress, but also partly because Aurora is working off her past experience of Oro's brother running off with a wildling.
Duck: Yes, and her own experience of turning her making herself look like a wildling to achieve her aims and get the heart because that was what she did to seduce Grim to get him to get the heart for her, she disguised herself as a wildling.
Dia: And she's just, I know she's right, but it is also interesting that she has such conviction that these events will replicate themselves, because they are so fundamentally important to her that she can't imagine them any other way but because of the curses she's inflicted on the universe the events that are emotionally important to her are emotionally important to the world.
Duck: Yes!
Dia: It's psychoanalysis played out in a world-changing
Duck: The prophecy is: reenact Aurora's neuroses sufficiently closely, and the curses will break. That that that is the the law on which this universe operates is if you can match the internal workings of Aurora's mind, based on on her memory and experiences yes, but also the myth that she's been telling herself this whole time of this. Aurora has projected out so successfully that the Universe actually is obeying the rules she wrote for it. Why do wildlings have to eat hearts? Because the curse says so. Where did the curse come from? Aurora. Why does Aurora say wildlings have to eat hearts? Because a wildling seduced her boyfriend.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: That's why their whole curse is about hearts, is because that's how Aurora thinks of them, that's why they're cursed to be dangerous lethal temptresses, is because Aurora put that on
them because she thought they were already like that because she was engaged in very personal, you know, bad relationship outcome in which that was a, you know, that that was her feeling about it at the time was that this specific wildling is a wicked temptress who has, whose wicked tempting ways have resulted in death and disaster and then the curse says sure that's what wildlings are. We may have just explained Azul.
Dia: True.
Duck: Aurora simply does not care about Azul, and therefore neither do the curses and neither does the book.
Dia: Though on that level there is something very like, I know that we're avoiding the Freudian sex stuff, but there is something so interesting about how personal her rage towards the wildling Violet or Viola, I forget?
Duck: Violet.
Dia: One of the two, Violet, uh Isla's ancestress, the wildling temptress who ran off with fiancé, the interesting thing about that is how personal that rage is and how all she really wants to happen to Oro as the substitute for the his brother who ran off on her is for him to be heartbroken but the curse isn't that bad, she doesn't curse the sunlings particularly badly it's about the same as the the nightshades who were if nothing but helpful to her in her situation, it's Oro specifically who she wants to be seduced and even that is for like practical purposes.
Duck: Right, and, but I think it is a combination of practical purposes, because she wants all the powers, but also because last time this happened the sunling king got seduced and her heart got broken so next time this happens the sunling king should get seduced and his heart should be broken.
Dia: Yeah, it's projection on a global stage.
Duck: Right, it's a, it's a mythical level payback.
Dia: And I mean who cares that, you know, your people are dropping dead at the age of 25 and you keep having to pretend to be a child, because what matters is your very specific and personal hurt feelings are now everyone's problem.
Duck: Yeah and I think it's very relevant here actually that Isla is so much younger.
Dia: Baby.
Duck: Right, specifically though--
Dia: And these men she is fucking are so old.
Duck: They are so old, but Grim and Oro and Aurora and Cleo, but she doesn't really matter.
Dia: And Azul, who really doesn't matter.
Duck: And Azul who really doesn't matter, um, but the the three who do to this psychodrama, so
Aurora, Oro, and Grim are definitely, their emotional response to Isla is very driven by, we
all know that in some way we have to reenact this curse, and we have known this for 500 years that we have to reenact this curse, and you Isla are the age that you should be for the curse.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Like she is the age that their predecessors were, or that Aurora was, when all of this kicked off, which makes it so much easier for them to project onto her as the the representation of the her, her own wildling ancestor, because she is not an immortal who simply looks that old who
they've known for 500 years, she actually is 20 years old in the first throes of figuring out what romance is.
Dia: And also let's be honest if she was older she would have known to avoid these men.
Duck: Oh yeah, if she was older, uh she would have met them and then thought about that and
then gone, nah.
Dia: I'm good.
Duck: You're not even that hot.
Dia: Not worth the effort. I mean, there is a sex scene and it is not impressive and I don't mean that from the author's perspective.
Duck: No, no, it was perfectly competently written as a not too detailed, because we are still working in young adult, like, I think the level of detail was appropriate to the level of book it is, but it doesn't seem to have any particularly profound effects on anyone involved.
Dia: It is kind of jarring and comes out of nowhere but only as much as the fact that Isla owns
eyelash curlers.
Duck: Yeah, lots of things in this book come out of nowhere in this way, the sex scene did not stand out and it's described as being, like, really good sex, but not in a world-changing way.
Dia: Yeah, especially because she's been having sort of like weird chronic sexy dreams.
Duck: She's been having so many sex dreams.
Dia: She's having nonstop sex dreams about this guy who as far as she's aware she's just met.
Duck: Right, and then there's the revelation at the end that he's like those aren't dreams those are memories!
Dia: Those are our memories.
Duck: I'm like, did you two do anything other than fuck.
Dia: No, I don't so.
Duck: She did not have a single dream about like, talking to you. She is not having dinner.
Dia: I mean, I guess those would be much funnier dreams to have out of nowhere.
Duck: Yes, and also much better foreshadowing.
Dia: Yeah because to be honest having crazy sex dreams about a guy you just met is so par the course for sort of 20 year old protagonists in sort of ACOTAR-adjacent genre fiction, I wasn't
even questioning it. I was just like, yeah yeah yeah, the Reylo hypothesis we all know it.
Duck: And even in real life, you are 20 years old, you have basically never met a boy before, and you are in a highly stressful situation of course you're having sex dreams about the boy.
Dia: Yeah.
Duck: Like, if your sexuality runs that way that is just a likely thing to happen. However, you're 20 years old, you're in a highly stressful situation, you've basically never met a boy before, you met this boy, he's sort of dark and brooding but also sort of flirtatious--
Dia: And he pronounces your name right.
Duck: Right, and you keep having these strange dreams about going to Tescos with him, this would be foreshadowing, this would be a clue that something was up!
Dia: It would be amazing.
Duck: A vivid and detailed and like, viscerally sensory dream about laundry and talking about his aunt.
Dia: I mean, that is how I dream about my crushes but that's just because I am pathetic.
Duck: Also you are not, I hate to break this to you, a YA protagonist.
Dia: Oh no, no, don't tell me that! I've been waiting! But I have a mysterious birthmark!
Duck: And some spooky old books!
Dia: I do have a lot of spooky old books but they are yet to produce any ghosts and I'm pretty disappointed with that.
Duck: It may it may turn out that you are in fact holding a spooky old book as as a source of vital plot knowledge for the YA protagonist . Keep an eye out for knockings at your door, they may be
heroes in disguise.
Dia: Sorry, I disappeared for a second.
Duck: That’s okay, I was telling you to keep a eye out for knockings at your door because they could be heroes in disguise.
Dia: Yeah, you said that exactly as some knocked on my actual door which was quite spooky to be fair.
Duck: That is quite spooky, were they a hero in disguise?
Dia: No, it was a very boring question about ordering a taxi.
Duck: Ah. And you said no and they said okay.
Dia: Because someone else is in my house and needs to take a taxi home.
Duck: Yeah, that, that's not really a mystery at all is it?
Dia: No, it's not at all, it's not a call to adventure I was hoping for.
Duck: No, this is the book of refusing the call to adventure right up until the last three chapters when adventure finally snapping at your heels catches up with you undeniably and the plot comes forth.
Dia: Isla is dragged kicking and screaming in even into interactions she chose to have.
Duck: Yes, which again relatable, I too wish to stay in bed.
Dia: I do relate deeply to everything Isla does, it's just that I hate that.
Duck: That's it, that's the thesis.
Dia: She's just so stressed.
Duck: You will project onto this character and you will not like what it tells you about yourself.
Dia: She's just so stressed and confused all the time.
Duck: She's wearing sexy clothes by accident and she doesn't like it.
Dia: She falls into a fucking pond.
Duck: She does, she does, she gets kidnapped and is a bit useless about it, which I also would be. She goes home to change before the big showdown, which, I would not be that cool but deeply respect.
Dia: I do, I love Isa I don't know what's going on with her at any point but I do enjoy reading her doing things. Because she does just do things.
Duck: I enjoy her visit to the tailor.
Dia: Yes, oh my God, and the like, the intrigue that he doesn't make gold clothes.
Duck: I love there is a single tailor for the whole society.
Dia: Yes.
Duck: He doesn't even have an apprentice, it's just him for the entire kingdom.
Dia: Except for the sunlings right who have their own tailor and this is presented as such a mystery.
Duck: Which is never resolved, by the way.
Dia: No, it just, it's just brought up that because it's going to cause plot inconvenience because she can't disguise herself as a sunling, because she has hair dye but she does not have the capacity to produce her own gold clothes.
Duck: Same on both counts.
Dia: It just feels weird that that's the thing you can't do as a monarch in a fantasy kingdom.
Duck: Right well the the whole bit with a tailor is very, obviously because could only bring so much luggage, and I'm like why?
Dia: Yeah, you came via portal!
Duck: I mean, yes there is presumably a limited amount of time and carrying capacity, but like, load down a flatbed trolley with your wardrobe and just pull it through with you and you could have so many clothes but no you've got like three outfits you brought with you and then then you have to go to the tailor because of luggage limits on the magical flight through a portal. This is the, the Dark Fantasy Hunger Games which you travel to via RyanAir.
Dia: Yep.
Duck: But also it makes a lot more sense if you think of it as a bunch of characters who are doing what they are doing for reasons fundamentally disconnected from the situation around them but deeply connected to their own hang-ups and internal narrative.
Dia: This is a story where everyone is having a lot of feelings and that affects everything about the world around them on like a baseline physical level.
Duck: Yes, this is a story about--
Dia: And not a single one of them has grown out of that in 500 years.
Duck: Yeah.
Dia: Because they all need fucking therapy.
Duck: Projecting your resentment so hard that the target of your ire literally cannot go out in the sun, just will die if he goes out in the sun because you are so mad and you’re all stuck in this situation because none of you have a goddamn therapist they didn't need a prophecy they needed a therapist, that’s the story of Lightlark.
Dia: Except for the bits about sex dreams, which…
Duck: Except for the bits about sex dreams, Magic artefacts, barkeeps who know too much, and
Dragon’s Den.
Dia: I think everyone involved in Dragon's Den in this world and any other needs therapy.
Duck: This is undeniably true.
Dia: Except the reggae reggae sauce guy.
Duck: We should wrap this up, because I have nothing more coherent to say, and all of the
incoherent rambling is reserved for the bonus episode.
Dia: Okay, I think it's time we went and wrapped up.
Duck: We should wrap up. I don't want to put it back in the box.
Dia: You don't have to, I just think you should.
Duck: It’s so hard to understand it well enough to analyse it, there's so much happening, and [stammering] I don't follow. I'm so confused by this book. I'm too stupid for this book, Dia, this book is too complicated for me.
Dia: The problem is this book is aimed at a demographic that has very different demands of plot than you and I and that's fine--
Duck: That’s slightly more comforting than what I thought you were going to say so I'll accept it.
Dia: I feel like it's aimed at at a demographic that has very specific needs, which it meets, it's just that those are not needs in which we share.
Duck: Right, I think this is this is very much a book written for wanting to be surprised at every turn.
Dia: And that's a valid request to have of a book it's just not one I personally have.
Duck: Yes, I think a lot of the sort of stylistic issues I have with it, and not in the sense of necessarily of disagreements, the the stylistic difficulty I have in understanding what's happening is that I keep trying to understand what's happening as if it was a sequence of events that made sense
if I understood them as opposed to a sequence of things happening one after another whose purpose is to surprise me every time.
Dia: And to bring you to the envisaged end point.
Duck: Yeah, there is, there is a bead at the end of this string but the previous beads are not materially connected to each other very well.
Dia: Okay, shall we roll some dice?
Duck: Yes, roll some dice. I don’t want to put this back.
Dia: You don't have to put it back, you can put anything in, it's okay put something else in. Let’s roll some dice. Okay I think I have a 16 to roll, yes, 16 sided dice a normal thing to have.
Duck: Normal to want, possible to achieve.
Dia: 11: archaeological.
Duck: Interesting, so this is what can this text teach us about the time and place in which it was produced.
Dia: This could go in some directions. Okay, um, and then 101, give me a second… oh fuck my fucking life, I recognize that number. I got a 50, which is: Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma.
Duck: That's a really interesting one.
Dia: We've done so much anime. Okay, let's go.
Duck: We have but… yeah.
Dia: Yeah, you're gonna have to send me some episodes to watch, and you can… So, listeners, you have two options you can wait a couple of weeks and we'll be back with an archaeological reading of the Food Wars anime, or you can come back right now because then we'll have had a cup of tea and we're ready to talk about our feelings about Lightlark.
Duck: I'm looking forward to to the bonus episode. I will see you there.
Dia: Have At! Bye-bye, guys!
Duck: See you next time!
[exit music]
Duck: You've been listening to Analysis Roulette, a podcast applying a randomly selected mode of analysis to a randomly selected creative work, just to see what happens. Your hosts have been Dia and Duck. You can find us on Spotify or on YouTube, and if you'd like to get in touch you can send us an email at analysisroulette@gmail.com. And remember, if you like our show, share it with your friends, and if you don't like our show, share it with your enemies. Thanks.