when your wife says she wants flowers you go get her those flowers even if it means moving your castle closer to the Waste and fulfilling more of a curse that has been placed upon you all while terrifying your boy apprentice
I was thinking the other day, about Howl’s Moving Castle and how fascinating a character Sophie is in that book. (And how her movie counterpart doesn’t hold a candle to her in the character motivation department. I mean, having no self-confidence because you think you’re not pretty is fine, I guess, if not a little basic, and Miyazaki does some interesting stuff with it, but compared to book Sophie… I can’t compare them, it’s not fair to movie Sophie! Yet I can’t help it.)
Anyway, book Sophie lives in a fairy tale world, and she knows it, and that’s where her lack of self confidence comes from. She has genre awareness, she knows the Rule of Three. That’s what’s making her say that being the eldest means that she’s doomed to fail at anything, so why bother trying? Even if she can admit that her family doesn’t fit what one would expect from a typical fairy tale set up in a lot of ways (Martha should have been the prettiest one, with Sophie and Lettie being ugly, but Sophie can admit that all three girls - including herself - are pretty, with Lettie being the most beautiful) it doesn’t matter. The Rule of Three trumps all.
Reading the rest of the book, it’s obvious that Sophie isn’t a failure at anything and everything she tries, so the book would appear to be a rebuttal of the Rule of Three, or at least a subversion of it. BUT (and that’s the potential hot take that I just can’t stop myself from sharing anymore), but, maybe not.
Think about it, the Rule of Three isn’t about the order of birth, it’s about the order in which the attempts are made. First attempt gets the least success, the second attempt is more successful, and the third attempt is the most successful of all. Usually, if those attempt are taken by three different people, the order is determined by the birth rank, because primogeniture. But it doesn’t have to be.
Look at the order in which the girls leave their childhood home to seek their fortunes, and at their respective fates.
Martha is the first one to leave. She goes far away but come back within a few weeks in secret, magically takes on Lettie’s appearance and becomes a baker’s apprentice, and by the end of the novel she’s dating Micheal in the hopes of marrying him quickly and have 10 children (spoken like someone who’s never spent any real time with infants). She doesn’t even have her own physical appearance back yet; she only “almost looked like herself again”.
Lettie is the second one to leave. She takes the chance Martha offers her and goes to study under Mrs Fairfax, who only agrees to teach her if she goes back to her true form, which she does. She learns magic, and it’s implied that she caught the eye of Prince Justin, and by the end of the novel she’s offered a chance to be the pupil of the Royal Wizard, Suliman.
Sophie, the third and last one to leave, is the literal protagonist. So much happens to her, I can’t even resume it in a sentence. By the end of the novel, she has played a key role in the destruction of the Witch of the Waste *and* her fire demon, which saved Prince Justin and Wizard Suliman, she freed Calcifer and saved Howl’s life, and she and Howl are prepared to live tumultuously but happily ever after. AND the curse that the Witch placed her on is broken, so she also looks like herself, or at least like her age, once more.
“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.
