Charlotte Kersten

“If you do not touch,” said Moondance, as if he read Vanyel’s thought, “You do not live. If you seal yourself away inside your barriers, you seal out the love with the pain. And though love sometimes brings pain, you have no way of knowing if the pain you feel now might not bring you to love again.”

Year published: 1989

Category: Fantasy

LGBTQIA representation: M/M, main character and his love interest, side characters

Summary: Vanyel lives in misery, knowing that he is different from the rest of his family and surviving under their disapproval because of it. Everything changes when he is shipped off to live with his aunt Savil, however – Vanyel discovers a magic all his own and is soon forced to confront what he has long repressed as he grows closer to his fellow mage Tylendel. What follows is love like he has never known, but with it comes even greater suffering.

My thoughts: I’ve said before and I’ll say it again and again: Mercedes Lackey walked so every current author of gay YA fantasy could run. I can think of only a few other authors who were writing gay characters as positively, passionately and frequently as Lackey during the time period in which she was writing, and the first thing that I want to make apparent is that I’m totally aware that any criticism I make of this book cannot and should not take away from how much it must have meant to its young gay readers. Indeed, the book’s Goodreads is full of reviews that say pretty much this exact thing, and I am a huge fan of this article by YA author Tessa Gratton about how much the series meant to her when she was growing up.

The book’s overall message is one of love and acceptance – that being gay does not make you a freak or a monster, that it is nothing to be ashamed of. And even if you have been treated as though there is something wrong with you, it will not always be so- there will be other people who will love you fiercely, protect you and support you. You will find your people. The most powerful and cathartic scene in the book to me is when Vanyel’s mentor Savil and his sister defend Vanyel from his father’s cruelty, toxic masculinity and homophobia:

“You come storming in here when we’ve maybe—maybe—got him stable, without so much as a ‘please’ or a ‘may I,’ you don’t even ask if he’s in any shape to put two words together in a sensible fashion! Oh, no, all you can do is scream that I’ve made him into a catamite when you sent him to be made into a man. A man!” She laughed, a harsh cawing sound that clawed its way up out of her throat. “My gods—what the hell did you think he was? Tell me, Withen, what kind of a man would send his son into strange hands just because the poor thing didn’t happen to fit his image of masculinity?”…

“What kind of a man would let a brutal bully break his son’s arm for no damned reason?” the girl snarled. “What kind of a man would drive his son into becoming an emotional eunuch because every damned time the boy looked for a little bit of paternal love he got slapped in the face? What kind of a man would take anyone’s word over his son’s with no cause to ever think the boy was a liar?” Lissa faced down her father as if he had become her enemy. “You tell me, Father! What right do you have to demand anything of him? What did you ever give him but scorn? When did you ever give him a single thing he really needed or wanted? When did you ever tell him he’d done well? When did you ever say you loved him?”…

What kind of a man would care more for his own reputation than his son’s life? And now I have one boy dead, and one a hair from dying, and all you care about is that somebody might think you weren’t manly enough to father manly sons! Oh, get out of here, get out of my sight—”

You can feel how important this is to Lackey in the writing, how desperately she wants to convey this message of love and protection to her readers. For this scene alone I am glad that I read Magic’s Pawn. There is also the matter of Savil’s concern over the relationship that starts between Vanyel and Tylendel – there is some good stuff in there about the dangers of codependency and how vulnerable young couple are especially susceptible to it. Finally, I think the other main message of the book is about Vanyel learning not to close off his heart because of the hurt and pain that he has gone through:

“Better, I thought, not to touch at all than to touch and bring hurt upon myself and others. Better to do nothing than to make a move and have it be the wrong one. But even deciding to not touch or to be nothing is a decision, Vanyel, and by deciding not to touch, so as to avoid hurt, I then hurt those who tried to touch me.”

Despite all of these incredibly positive things, I do have some reservations about this book. I think the standards we have for gay representation have evolved a lot since the time in which this book was written – through no fault of the book’s own, and the only reason we’ve been able to develop these standards is because of authors like Lackey paving the way with representation to begin with. HOWEVER, as a modern reader…the entire plot of the story is essentially about Vanyel trying to survive after the death of his beloved partner. I think you could make the argument that the decision to kill off Tylendel falls under the Bury Your Gays trope, defined as the exploitative overuse of gay character deaths in media. I also wasn’t super pleased with the portion of the story where the sad broken white boy gets shipped off to heal by learning from the heavily Native-American-coded characters. The problem is not so much that these characters exist in the story, but that they feel tokenized and exotified, and their entire purpose in the story revolves around using their mystical wisdom to fix the broken white character.

In addition, for a book that hinges so significantly upon the love story, I can’t say that I ever felt an intense amount of investment in the relationship between Vanyel and Tylendel – it’s not a very convincing love story, to me at least, because of the speed with which they fall in love and more or less just suddenly declare themselves soulmates. I think you could definitely argue, however, that this decision was a deliberate statement upon the codependent Young Love nature of the relationship. Finally, I have to mention utterly random inclusion of the pedophilic-rapist villain who comes out of nowhere at the 95% mark and tries to seduce Vanyel into turning to the Dark Side. What was that about?!

I’m still trying to decide to what extent this is a story about resilience and healing and to what extent it is kind of just misery porn. I’d be super interested in hearing how you all weigh in!