In the land of Ingary, where such things as seven-league boots and cloaks of invisibility really exist, it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek your fortunes.
I like the way Diana Wynne Jones writes about love. While it’s not how Hayao Miyazaki potrays relationships, where two people mentally inspire each other to live and grow and mature, it is still something more closer to my heart. She writes relationships in a way where both characters are inherently flawed and imperfect, and that that shouldn’t stop them from chasing their happily ever afters. She writes love in a way where it’s something that exists for everyone, in different ways, as a reassurance that no matter where you are, or what you may look like, you can be the most cherished existence to someone else.
And that someone else can be just some guy from Wales who will summon demons from hell just because of a bad hair day, will insist he’s cone sold stober when he’s clearly not, and will lovingly cure your arthritis. Or it can be a fierce woman who will not hesitate to yeet weed killer in the face of her feelings, likes to cut up suits to teach you a lesson, insists that the root of all her problems is her being born the eldest of three sisters, and can bring things to life with her love. And those are perfectly okay qualities for seeking a happy life.
thinking about immediately post-hmc when michael is off courting martha and a newly-freed calcifer is out enjoying the open air and the cavernous sky and howl is… elsewhere, and sophie comes home to the castle after a long day of selling flowers by herself to find the hearth empty and cold and the workbench vacated and the creaking walls still and stationary, void of fire demon magic keeping it animated, and she blinks rapidly exhausted and sad and missing her family and resigns herself to a dinner of quiet and lonely proportions but the door swings open and howl’s there. he’s got a glint in his eyes and expensive clothes for her under his arm and a laughingly barbed remark under his tongue but it’s softened, now, by his heart, and when he lights the hearth with a flick of his wrist it’s not quite as warm as calcifer’s smirking green flames but sophie is warmed — and the door keeps swinging open, and howl keeps coming home, and the castle keeps settling into its old bones, aching and slow as a curse.
“Cart and Cwidder” isn’t Diana Wynne Jones’s best known book, but it’s arguably one of her most mainstream-accessible stories (along with its 3 sequels that make up the Dalemark Quartet). It’s not as humorous as her other work (without being dour, either), and as always it deals with children thrust into a situation beyond their control.
What’s interesting about this series is that it plays a lot of fantasy tropes straight while also building in Jones’s signature realism when it comes to character psychology, themes of friendship, and how people cope in different ways in dire circumstances.
So this is all running through my head while sketching Moril, Brid, and Dagner, the three bard siblings who find themselves having to make a rush for the northern border with Kialan, a recently escaped political hostage with Southern forces on his tracks. And all the while, the stories of the North, the South, and forbidden histories and ballads haunt their road, reminding everyone that some stories are too powerful to happen only once or twice. Some stories repeat themselves whether we want them to or not. The only escape is to take the story in hand and twist it, hard.
So Moril (the youngest sibling) twists the story. And it’s one of the most terrifying things written in a Jones book.
Head empty, only Charmed Life thoughts when I sketch. Some Janet and Gwendolen sketches.
Gwendolen and Janet are such interesting characters. At first, I thought Janet was supposed to come off as “not like other girls” but it’s just that she’s so overwhelmed by trying to pass for Gwendolen and absorb the facts of an alternate universe (e.g., says she doesn’t know where Atlantis is in geography class, “How was I supposed to know it’s what people in my world call America??”). So we don’t get to see much of Janet’s personality except her problem-solving skills, because that’s chiefly what has her attention. She’s really grounded and practical! And that’s also how Gwendolen is, except Gwendolen is in her element and can come up with some pretty ambitious plans with more confidence.
I wonder what Janet and the alternate Gwendolens would have been like if they had had their own versions of Eric.
I’ll let you all decide which is Janet and which is Gwendolen. It seems more fun to make them hard to distinguish.
really neat of diana wynne jones to have written a whole book in her fantasy series around the idea of archaeologists translating a woman’s woven story/spell from thousands of years earlier, and so making all the storytelling and magic in the book entirely tied up with each other and with the act of weaving
