Where Conviction and Insecurity Collide: Boreali Fidelity (Part 2)

Jan 9

This is part 2 of the series “The Place Where Conviction and Insecurity Collide”. See original post here.

COLLISION: Boreali Fidelity

Aside from the plot, the most critical aspect of this series is its tangibility. Meaning, that as the characters traverse the map, each book feels like its respective House. Each territory, people group, and culture deserves the same respect as that which came before. The problem—or challenge at least—is that readers will fall in love with some Houses more than others, and will wish to imprint those traits onto subsequent books.

But it doesn’t work like that. It can’t, not if we want to preserve distinctions.

Without distinctions, we have no Orynthia.

Boreal proves that more than any House thus far.

It’s not the reader’s fault. In modern society, we’ve been conditioned to apply Hegel’s dialectical thinking to every situation, homogenizing opposing forces into central commonalities. We are no longer comfortable with distinctions—they force us to pick sides and play favorites, perhaps changing our minds given the circumstance. The unavoidable consequence is that distinctions preserve diversity. Coerce everything, and everyone, into the same mold and their differences are shaved off. That’s not to devalue collaboration efforts in a search for common ground. On the contrary, preserved diversity requires teamwork. Distinctions engage a more passionate discourse, a more visceral pursuit of that narrow overlap at the center. We have to fight for it. By honoring our differentiations, we elevate the ultimate good in order to unite. It’s well earned and it’s believed in.

Distinctions make our Quadren realistic.

People are different. They are motivated by varied goals achieved by equally varying ends. People don’t agree and sometimes, they never will. But still they have to work together. Erase distinctions and that fight suddenly becomes “easy”, when life so often reminds us that it isn’t.

“He who fights with reality lives in Hell.”
~Spencer Klavan

Many readers were counting down the days until they could finally visit Luscia’s long awaited, mist-cloaked shores. I’d kept Boreal a mystery for many reasons, the primary being that the northern peninsula should feel segregated from the rest of the realm. Other. Secluded and set apart. This seeded a natural anticipation among fans. It also brought on expectations, some, unfortunately, which were not characteristic of the region but rather the readers and their preferences.

Boreal is not like the other Houses. And neither is Luscia.

The highlands are shrouded for good reason, and so are the Boreali people. They are measured, ornamented, intentioned, poised, and prayerful. They battle with inhuman reflexes yet debate with the patience of melting ice.

The Boreali are beautiful.

The Boreali are frustrating.

There we have the general tone of this book: Beautiful and frustrating. Tones that I wanted the reader to experience alongside the characters, not through them as proxy.

House of Darakai was a great example of this method, showcasing how I tried to adjust my pacing, prose, character arcs, plotline(s), etc. to mirror the texture of that specific House. Within Book 2, we had these brash sprints, be it in battle, dialogue, or at passion-fueled crossroads. Darakai dealt in punches. That’s the South—the House of War—to a tee. House of Boreal, however, couldn’t feel that way. Boreal needed to feel like a melodic waterfall, cascading evenly and in intricate ripples over its major events. Whereas House of Pilar, if I execute it rightly, should feel like mathematic poems unfolding across the page. Thus positioning House of Thoarne to be a celebration of the whole.

Beauty is Boreal’s foremost virtue. Though not the kind of superficial beauty that powders one’s face or functions as cheap lamination over something ugly. Boreal’s beauty is soil-deep. It’s threaded through everything that springs forth, be it from the ground or from the person. Bertrand Russell, a British mathmetician and philospher from the late nineteenth century, puts the importance of beauty so elegantly:

“Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, without the gorgeous trappings of painting or music, yet sublimely pure, and capable of a stern perfection such as only the greatest art can show. The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than Man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as poetry.”
~Bertrand Russell

Or in the words of G. M. Baker, beauty therefore is a property of all things good.

Yet that does not make it impervious to corruption…for wherever mankind is, there too is his corrupted nature—a seemingly paradoxical principle the Quadren confronts in the glittering highlands.

This only fuels the reader’s frustration further. Contrasting their rivals to the south, the North is not so reactionary. And that is what makes them infuriating. Their rules are binding and the Boreali follow them, even when they don’t want to. This patterns up into the highest seats of their own government. The Quadren can’t come riding in to overrule everything just because they are in trouble. Neither can Luscia. Not even because the realm is collapsing.

As I feared, this was palpable among early reviews. In a couple cases, readers expressed their annoyance and asked, “did the author intend to make me feel this way?”

Yes.

That’s exactly what I intended to do. Unfortunately, it seemed to work.

But you won’t believe the character’s toil if you don’t feel it too. If the tug of war isn’t real within your heart, you won’t understand why they do what they do about it. If you want to go to Boreal…then you really need to sit there.

Even though it makes you pull your hair out.

Preserving distinctions is a tough feat. Most readers don’t actually desire them. While writing HOBL, I had to consistently fight the urge to conform Boreal into Darakai’s image, since that’s what most fans craved. Perhaps a part of me did too. We yearn for Book 3 to be an extension of Book 2. Yet in the end, that would only be a betrayal.

To both Houses.