Sunshine Book Club Week 7

[accidentallymel]

Okay, so we're coming up on the end! Next week will be the last one of these, and then the week after that we'll talk about Chalice, which I'm super excited about, just fyi. But before we do that, we need to talk about what happened this week.

This section of the book contains one of my favorite lines in all of Sunshine, that bit about vampires

Comments

[accidentallymel]

. . . That is a terrifying thought, about the goddess of pain, and it makes a lot of sense? If magic handlers have to go through trials to make them who they are more intensely, what if who you are is not a great person? Or even leaving aside the goddess' ethics for the moment, the idea that she's just a really intense, abrasive personality made more so through the clarifying process would definitely help explain the aura she has where it's like she's melting your brain just being in the same room.

I think also that if Mel is a sorcerer, he's probably very aware of the stereotypes people buy into about sorcerers, and the fact that he doesn't really fit any of them? Which definitely would help with the whole blending in thing - he just never mentions his ability to work magic, and everyone assumes that he doesn't have any, because he can't, right? He doesn't look/act like a sorcerer. And Rae's grandmother doesn't look/act like a sorcerer either, although she manifestly is something (I wouldn't call her a sorcerer, but that's because at least in McKinley's world sorcerer seems to have negative connotations? And I don't think they apply, here), so I think it must have just been something about the isolation during their magic lessons that made Rae think of them as something separate and other rather than something that would have happened in a family environment.

[biggersandwich]

Especially when it does seem like part of the problem is that Rae is currently extremely sensitive to magic, so the goddess being intense at her is particularly shitty for her, but not in a way that's precisely the goddess' fault.

Absolutely. It's not that Mel ever seems to be lying about anything, but he certainly has a cultivated persona to activate. I think Rae was also responding to the fact that people who develop magic leave their communities for at least a bit to learn it, and then when/if they return, there isn't a good sense that the two communities have now overlapped? Which doesn't mean there isn't a vibrant magic-handler community out there, just that it's not as visible to people who aren't in it, even if they see individual magic-handlers around. Plus, the Wars seem to have done a lot to encourage people to keep secrets, which can't help with these divisions.

[accidentallymel]

Re: Rae being very sensitive to magic - I am kind of wondering if that's a Con thing, or simply the effect of her own power being woken up again after all those years of neglect. I'm leaning toward the latter, but I feel like the Con thing isn't really helping.

Absolutely the Wars played a part in it, but I think there was probably a good deal of separation between the two communities before the Wars, if just from the way Rae describes her school years - there seems to be some instinctive separation between those who can handle magic and those who can't (I can't tell if there's prejudice in there as well, since it's one of the things Rae is oblivious to, but I can't imagine there isn't at least a little fear). But I definitely agree that there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of overlap between the two communities.

[biggersandwich]

Agreed. Some combination of coming into her power suddenly, plus her power being augmented by something that is so very alien, in a way that feeling a bit better in sunshine than most people do isn't.

I wonder if it has to do with magic-handling and being partblood being sort of linked in the public mind? Because it seems like a combination of prejudice and fear and the way Rae and Aimil talk about people reacting to Rae when she was little seems to have a lot in common with people's fear of crosses, even though they only knew the Blaise bit and didn't seem to have any of her concerns about crosses. Or at least linked ideas of them being the same kind of danger, even though there doesn't seem to be that much danger in the majority of crosses, and ditto most people who suddenly discover that they can do some magic.

[accidentallymel]

I think that people who suddenly discover that they can do magic later in life are probably the people who deal with the most prejudice and fear - because what if they're that sort of cross? And someone with one of the big magic-handling names is definitely going to be treated differently, even if they never do any magic at all, just because maybe they could. But I have to agree that there seems to be something similar in the partblood/magic handler stigmata.